Lecture Review Week 5

Database --- This lecture covers conceptual modeling. It's more diagrams than words showing relationships between entities


Business Law --- The conclusion of contract laws this week covers the discharge from contracts. This is done in 4 ways. Firstly, when the contract is completed exactly and precisely, you are automatically discharged from the contract. It's 'ALL OR NOTHING', unless it's a divisible contract that states when you completed the contract to certain extent, you get paid partially.

Second way is ending the contract by agreement. Third way is by frustration, where neither party is at fault that the contract cannot be completed. In this case, the deposit must be refunded, no more outstanding sum of money will be payable but you can be paid for the expanses made so far till the point when there is a frustration.

The fourth way is by breaching the contract. Of course, this means there's a case. You can be sued for damages for breaching, but the amount of damages must be kept as low as possible for the wrong-doer. Damages is not profit, but a form of compensation. If damages is not enough, then Specific Performance may be used to make up for the inadequency.


Business Communication --- Proposal is an offer to furnish goods and services, research a subject, or to provide a solution to a problem. They can be divided into four types, solicited internal, usually requested by your boss to provide a solution to a problem, unsolicited internal, which you initiate to offer a solution to your boss (bootlicking?!), solicited external and unsolicited external.

Proposal writing can be divided into eight steps.
Step 1) Analyze RFP, Request for Proposal. Content requirement that gives technical function requirement, legal requirement which states terms and conditions, ownership of work, administration information which gives point of contacts, due date and how many copies of the proposal required, format guideline which states the language, font, page layout for the proposal.

Step2) Do research, understand the problem and needs of the public through market research. Do product research by coming out with viable solutions to the problem. Client research writing a targetted proposal.

Step3) Design a prototype,

Step4) Focus the proposal, arouse the interest of the reader


Artificial Intelligence --- One more searching technique introduced. This will be used in the the first project for the module. I wonder why people already finished this project even before this lecture.. Alpha-Beta pruning is a technique that that searches for a highest 'Minimax' value from the different states possible. The idea here is to assume the opponent is optimal, thus you can omit some paths which you know will lead to a worse state. However, if the opponent is noob, and will not choose his optimal path, then this technique may not be optimal.

This pruning depends alot on the order of expansion of nodes, sometimes, there may not be pruning at all.


Software Engineering --- Wow, this lecture basically just expand the Use-case Diagram and Domain Model to contain more detail planning. This will be the design for the software that you are going to build.