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Today's post-mortem...
...brought to you from the Phoenix Room, so that I can stop it spinning around in my head for the entire half-hour walk home.
Considering my dire predictions of doom for this exam, it didn't actually go all that badly, I think; I'm fairly sure I got at least half marks, which is entirely adequate for my worst paper.
Question One: 7-17 marks
I did this question. It was about phase-structured grammars. I do not know what a phase-structured grammar is, but I assumed it was rather like the other kinds of grammar. It was also about lex and yacc, which I do not recall the syntax for.
Part (a): 3-5 marks
Part (b): 2 marks
Part (c): 0-2 marks; I did rather cheat by using productions that were basically the same, and that weren't legal under the convention that I'd stated in (a).
Part (d): 0-2 marks; I said 'no because handwave'.
Part (e): I wrote a vaguely competent looking lex input, and a really incompetent yacc input which I ran out of time to finish, with a fairly competent description of how it ought to look when I'd finished it. So 2-6 marks depending how generous they're feeling.
Question Two: 10-20 marks
This was a waffly question on auction theory. I ought to like waffly questions. Unfortunately I think I lost a little at it, due to not really having eight marks worth of stuff to say for the first bit (4-8 marks), and discovering that I was kind of repeating myself in the implications section in the second bit (6-12 marks).
Question Three: 10-20 marks
I didn't understand their definition of a closed hash table, and as for the merits of the secondary probes, there was Much Waffling. If I waffled in the right direction all the time, I could have won at this question, but I doubt very much that I have.
Question Four: I took one look at this question, noticed the word 'perceptron', thought 'ah, right, the bit of the course I didn't even read the notes for', and went on to the next one.
Question Five: 13-19 marks
This looked like a beautiful Operating Systems question until I wroked out that I didn't know the right answer to the eight mark chunk, if there even was one. I did it anyway, because even halfway do-able questions were thin on the ground. My waffle managed to convince me, so hopefully it will wring a couple of marks out of the examiners.
Question Six: This one was doomed on account of being Continuous Mathematics, which I fail entirely to understand. I get the feeling that it was actually really, really easy, if you knew the first thing about Fourier Series.
Question Seven: Unfortunately I spent a bit of time on this one, before I discovered that I didn't have the first clue of how to go about the main part of the ten mark question and my algebra was still utterly worthless. Oh, also that there wasn't really seven marks worth of obvious stuff in the last bit. So this got ditched in the end.
Question Eight: 12-16 marks
If I'd have done any revision of this bit of CS&A, this would have been trivial. As it was, it was merely fairly easy with occasional outbreaks of waffle, especially in the bit about reflection where I have not the first clue about how it keeps it type safe except a little mental note saying 'it's complicated'.
Question Nine: I even almost attempted this question, and I'm sure if I had time to stare at it blankly for an hour or so then the answer would come to me, but there were enough other questions that I could do more easily that I didn't bother wasting the time on it, because it was rather all-or-nothing and there was a rather large risk that I'd spend lots of time trying to work it out and still fail to.
Considering my dire predictions of doom for this exam, it didn't actually go all that badly, I think; I'm fairly sure I got at least half marks, which is entirely adequate for my worst paper.
Question One: 7-17 marks
I did this question. It was about phase-structured grammars. I do not know what a phase-structured grammar is, but I assumed it was rather like the other kinds of grammar. It was also about lex and yacc, which I do not recall the syntax for.
Part (a): 3-5 marks
Part (b): 2 marks
Part (c): 0-2 marks; I did rather cheat by using productions that were basically the same, and that weren't legal under the convention that I'd stated in (a).
Part (d): 0-2 marks; I said 'no because handwave'.
Part (e): I wrote a vaguely competent looking lex input, and a really incompetent yacc input which I ran out of time to finish, with a fairly competent description of how it ought to look when I'd finished it. So 2-6 marks depending how generous they're feeling.
Question Two: 10-20 marks
This was a waffly question on auction theory. I ought to like waffly questions. Unfortunately I think I lost a little at it, due to not really having eight marks worth of stuff to say for the first bit (4-8 marks), and discovering that I was kind of repeating myself in the implications section in the second bit (6-12 marks).
Question Three: 10-20 marks
I didn't understand their definition of a closed hash table, and as for the merits of the secondary probes, there was Much Waffling. If I waffled in the right direction all the time, I could have won at this question, but I doubt very much that I have.
Question Four: I took one look at this question, noticed the word 'perceptron', thought 'ah, right, the bit of the course I didn't even read the notes for', and went on to the next one.
Question Five: 13-19 marks
This looked like a beautiful Operating Systems question until I wroked out that I didn't know the right answer to the eight mark chunk, if there even was one. I did it anyway, because even halfway do-able questions were thin on the ground. My waffle managed to convince me, so hopefully it will wring a couple of marks out of the examiners.
Question Six: This one was doomed on account of being Continuous Mathematics, which I fail entirely to understand. I get the feeling that it was actually really, really easy, if you knew the first thing about Fourier Series.
Question Seven: Unfortunately I spent a bit of time on this one, before I discovered that I didn't have the first clue of how to go about the main part of the ten mark question and my algebra was still utterly worthless. Oh, also that there wasn't really seven marks worth of obvious stuff in the last bit. So this got ditched in the end.
Question Eight: 12-16 marks
If I'd have done any revision of this bit of CS&A, this would have been trivial. As it was, it was merely fairly easy with occasional outbreaks of waffle, especially in the bit about reflection where I have not the first clue about how it keeps it type safe except a little mental note saying 'it's complicated'.
Question Nine: I even almost attempted this question, and I'm sure if I had time to stare at it blankly for an hour or so then the answer would come to me, but there were enough other questions that I could do more easily that I didn't bother wasting the time on it, because it was rather all-or-nothing and there was a rather large risk that I'd spend lots of time trying to work it out and still fail to.