Online Course Discussion Forum

MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications

 
 
Picture of
MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by - Saturday, January 28, 2017, 3:20 PM
 

Hello!

I have a few questions regarding the week 7 homework. Firstly, when questions ask for a general formula or recursive formula, do we need to justify our answer (unless specified)? Secondly, on question P4, what is a "natural" bijection? I don't quite understand it, and the question doesn't provide a "definition" for it. Also, on P5, is there a non-negative or positive number of balls in each box (when distributing)? I know it wouldn't make any sense if there were a positive number, but I'm just making sure.

Thank you,

Sophie

 
Picture of Lucas Sha
Re: MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by Lucas Sha - Sunday, January 29, 2017, 11:53 AM
 

I think natural bijection means a bijection which has a clear "pattern" to it? (I'm not entirely sure though). Basically like if A = {0,1,2,3,4,5,...n-1} and B = {1,2,3,4,5,6,...n} then a "natural" bijection from A to B would be 0 --> 1, 1-->2, 2-->3,...,n-1 --> n

Picture of
Re: MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by - Sunday, January 29, 2017, 1:25 PM
 

Thank you!

I have a few more questions:

I have another question: on F4, I could not find a clear pattern. 16384 is 2 to the 14th power, but how does that correlate to the pattern with 2 to the zeroth, 1st, and 2nd power? I thought it might be 128 (2 to the seventh) or in even powers of 2 (0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14). In addition, when they ask to find a bijection or write one out, do we need an example or actually prove that there exists a bijection? Thanks!

Picture of Lucas Sha
Re: MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by Lucas Sha - Sunday, January 29, 2017, 2:39 PM
 

Yeah, I made a post about F4, I am confused about it as well. (I am pretty sure it is a typo, due to the context of the problem, Quick Response).

Picture of Lucas Sha
Re: MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by Lucas Sha - Sunday, January 29, 2017, 2:56 PM
 
P7
Picture of
Re: MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by - Sunday, January 29, 2017, 4:21 PM
 

P7? It seems that you are in Math Challenge IIA, do you use the same material? For IIB we are doing Recurrence Relations, P7 has to do with number neighbors and complementary counting.

Picture of David Reynoso
Re: MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by David Reynoso - Monday, January 30, 2017, 10:50 AM
 

Hello!


- Unless it is extremely obvious, you should try to justify where the formula came from.

- For P4: Take a look at the section about "Combinatorial Proof and Bijections" before the questions on the handout. There is an example about a natural bijection between the outcomes of flipping a coin $4$ times and the words of length $4$ made up only of the letters $H$, $T$: if you throw a coin $4$ times and get  heads, tails, tails, heads (in that order), then you can associate the four letter word $HTTH$ for that outcome. As Lucas Sha mentioned, you can see here there is a "clear pattern" there. In some way, it may even be silly  to say there is a bijection since it is clearly the easiest (natural) way to list the possible outcomes of throwing four coins. For the problem in question it may help to work on a particular example first, choose a small value for $n$ and list out all the numbers in set $A$, and all the elements in $P(B)$ (make sure to use the hint!). Be careful though, $P(B)$ is a set of sets. 

- For P5: you are correct, it is possible to have some empty boxes.

- On F4 there is indeed a typo, the problem should read 

$$\binom{7}{0} + 2 \cdot \binom{7}{1} + \cdots + 128 \cdot \binom{7}{7}$$


Best,

David

Picture of
Re: MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by - Monday, January 30, 2017, 1:07 PM
 
Thank you! 

But, say you write out the first 4 or so terms, and you find the pattern, you state the general/recursive formula (which ever one the problem states). Would that be valid?

Picture of David Reynoso
Re: MC II-B Week 7 Homework Clarifications
by David Reynoso - Monday, January 30, 2017, 2:01 PM
 

You're welcome!

Yes, that would be enough (: