I had my exam this morning. I think it went OK, but I can’t really be sure. My hand cramped up after an hour and a half of writing—in the middle of an answer about speech-to-text systems. I really could have used a speech-to-text system at that point! I ran out of time attempting to perform Viterbi decoding on a 7x4 state trellis, but not before I was dealing with fun-to-write probabilities like 0.00001126. Viterbi decoding is exactly the kind of exercise that should not be undertaken by hand.

I came across this webcomic yesterday. I also updated the FAQ to reflect the fact that I now have only one exam left in my university career.