Hasn't been much of interest happening, so I haven't written anything. Yesterday I had an Ultimate game with Orem Ultimate. We only had 7 team member show up so we played savage (no subs). The other team had 2 subs. We won, 15-10, but it was very tiring. The weather was nice though, so that was a bonus. All except for the little gnats or whatever they were they would start buzzing around your head every time you stood still for 10 seconds. Better than the week before though, when it was ~39 degrees and snowed for the first half of the game. That game started out rather sad, we started 0-9. Not a single point the entire first half. But then we got our act together and came back with 8 unanswered points and made it 8-9. At one point I think it was tied 10-10. Then we ended up losing 10-15 or 11-15 I don't remember which. But it was COLD.

Other than that, I spent the 7th completely ill. And the rest of that week catching up. Then the 252 students took a test that we need to get graded. As part of that I decided I didn't really want to spend a bunch of time analyzing the Push Down Automata (PDA) that they were required to write out for one of the answers. So I took 6 hours and wrote a Non-Deterministic Finite Automata Simulator and a Push Down Automata Simulator. It was kind of fun to do actually. It was fun to write in Python again after having to deal with Java for my Natural Language Processing class.

So I wrote up and tested the two simulators. Then I wrote a quick piece that would test all pertinent strings up to length 11 and determine whether the machine the students needed to write should accept or reject the strings. Now, all I have to do is transcribe their machines into my simple notation and run the 4096 strings on it. If they pass all 4096 correctly then there is a very high likelihood that their machine is correct. And the more strings they fail the more wrong their machine is. So, while programming the simulator and then transcribing each machine may not end up saving me any time the work will be much less frustrating and tiresome. And I can pass on the simulators to future TAs for them to use in teaching or grading.

So those are the exciting highlights of my last two weeks.

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