Resolvents was one of my homeworks for the Logics for Computer Science course in my first semester of collage. It has an interesting story. This homework, though by itself insignificant, helped mark an important point in my development: proving that anything that can be done by a program isn’t worth doing by hand.
I wasn’t very good at theory since I wasn’t inclined towards it. I might have failed that course if not for the fact that the teaching assistant I had decided to switch from blackboard exercises to letting us pick and solve our exercise on his wiki. I read the email late and picked the only remaining exercise. It required writing a program (in any language) that finds resolvents for any specified formulas. While other exercises required finding resolvents for given formulas by hand, this was the only exercise that required writing a program.
I wrote this program in Python and tested it on the exercises of my colleagues. I was able to show that some of them were wrong even though they got a full mark for it. In retrospect this was kind of a dick move.
This influenced my attitude toward certain simple games. I would rather write a general solution to them than play them by hand. I guess some might call this cheating.
It also influenced my desire towards automating everything in software development.