Theory of Computation

From Oeuvres de Blaise Pascal, Pascaline (1779)

Course Outline and Lectures:


The following is a tentative outline for the lectures for the course:


Date Module Lecture Description Reading
Jan 19 1 1 Deterministic Finite State Automata Kozen (Lec. 1-4)
Jan 21 2 Non-deterministic Finite State Automata Kozen (Lec. 5-6), Hopcroft-Ullman (Ch. 2.3)
Jan 28 3 Regular Operations and Closure Properties Kozen (Lec. 10, 13)
Feb 2 4 Kleene Theorem Kozen (Lec. 8, 9, A)
Feb 4 5 Myhill-Nerode Theorem Kozen (Lec. 13, 14, 15, 16)
Feb 9 6 Weighted Automata
Feb 11 2 7 Chomsky Hierarchy and Generative Grammars Kozen (Lec. 19, 20, 22)
Feb 18 8 Push-down Automata Kozen (Lec. E, 24, 25)
Feb 23 9 Deterministic Turing Machines
Feb 25 10 Nondeterministic and Multi-Tape Turing Machines
March 11 11 Lambda Calculus and the Church-Turing Thesis
March 16 3 12 Decidable Problems
March 18 13 The Halting Problem and Limits of Computation
March 25 14 Rice's Theorem
March 30 15 More Undecidable Problems
TBD 4 16 Time Complexity
TBD 17 NP-Completeness and Cook-Levine Theorem
TBD 18 Reducibilities Among Combinatorial Problems
TBD 19 Space Complexity and Savitch's Theorem
TBD 20 Hierarchy Theorems and the Complexity Zoo

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