whodathunkit

As much as the course was taught poorly when I took it, what I *did* get out of CS51 has so far put me ahead of many of the MsCs in Prop. Meth. Understanding NP completeness (though not necessarily being so good at proofs) and reductions, in particular; as well as the practice with quantification and finite state automata in terms of Turing machines have helped. Now I am taking a whole course in the very things I had hated -- especially the esoteric propositional satisfiability. However, now I'm starting to see the power behind putting it into practice to solve hard problems efficiently -- the problem with 51 is that uses were never considered, just boring proofs. Well, never say never =)