I passed my second diploma exam today, again with 1.7. Mostly theoretical computer science: logics, computer assisted proving and proof verification systems, automata theory (buechi, muller, … so mostly on trees and infinite words, not just undergrad DFAs) and coding theory.

The professor told me I could easily have done better if I had had learned the formal definitions and that better (just as the professor did in the previous exam on databases, index structures, dataminig and knowledge discovery in databases).

I had expected doing much worse in this exam, since I had big trouble concentrating the last months (the heat wave in germany and the worldcup certainly did not help either). I ended up learning just one or two hours a day on average, which is really really little. Way to little. So I’m quite happy with these results (especially since I don’t care about the grades too much anyway), given the amount of work I spent.

What I’m really unhappy with is my lack of concentration these days. I used to be able to focus very well. I never was good at learning stuff literally, but I used to be able to sit down and tackle problems for hours at a time until I was really into the topic. I havn’t been recently, which made me really wonder if I would be able to continue my studies as is… well, todays result, too, showed that even when not focussing I’m doing quite well.

Two more exams coming up - one on Algebra (starting with galois theory, so the contents of this course are apparently usually taught as “abstract algebra” or “advanced algebra” in the U.S.; no matrices, linear transformations or vector spaces involved), the other on programming, modelling and data languages, so UML/OCL, XML/CSS/XSLT/other markup, logic programming techniques etc.

Then all that remains to do to finish my degree is a six-month thesis, which will hopefully be on generating UIs (this may include a text UI) from schema languages such as XSD.