CS341  Automata Theory
Elaine Rich

Schedule of Classes

  Week

Topics

 

Jan. 17

Why study automata theory?

 

Problems as languages

 

Roadmap to the theory we will build

 

Finite state machines

 

Jan. 24

Finite state machines, continued

 

Nondeterministic finite state machines

 

Jan. 31

Finite state transducers

 

Stochastic FSMs

 

Regular expressions

 

Equivalence of regular expressions and FSMs

 

Feb. 7

Closure properties of regular languages

 

Regular Pumping Theorem

 

Feb.14

Functions on regular languages

 

Decision procedures for regular languages

 

Review of regular languages

 

Context-free grammars

 

Feb. 21

Manipulating context-free grammars

Tuesday evening: Midterm 1

Parse trees

 

 

Ambiguity

 

Feb. 28

Pushdown automata

 

Equivalence of PDAs and CFGs

 

March 6

Context-Free Pumping Theorem

 

Closure properties of context-free languages

 

Decision procedures for CF languages

 

March 13

SPRING BREAK

 

March 20

Turing machines

 

Multiple tapes and nondeterminism

 

March 27

Simulating real computers

The Universal Turing machine

 

 

Church’s Thesis

 

 

Other computational models

 

 

The unsolvability of the halting problem

 

 

Decidable and semidecidable languages

 

April 3

Reduction proofs for undecidability

Tuesday evening: Midterm 2

April 10

More on reduction proofs

 

Rice’s Theorem

 

April 17

Examples of practical consequences

 

Reduction proofs for nonsemidecidability

 

April 24

Other undecidable problems

 

 

The Chomsky Hierarchy

 

May 1

Introduction to complexity

 

 

P and NP

 

 

NP-complete problems