CS341  Automata Theory
Elaine Rich

Schedule of Classes – Fall 2014

 

Week

Topics

 

Aug. 28

Why study automata theory?

 

What is a language?

 

Sept. 2

Review of background topics

 

 

The big picture

 

 

Finite state machines

 

Sept. 9

Nondeterministic finite state machine

 

Finite state transducers

 

Sept. 16

Regular expressions

 

Equivalence of regular expressions and FSMs

 

Closure properties of regular languages

 

Sept. 23

Regular Pumping Theorem

 

Pumping Theorem and closure

 

Sept. 30

Functions on regular languages

 

Decision procedures for regular languages

 

What is a grammar?

 

Oct. 7

Context-free grammars

Tuesday evening: Midterm 1

Manipulating context-free grammars

 

Parse trees

 

 

Ambiguity

 

Oct. 14

Applications of CFGs

 

Pushdown automata

 

Equivalence of PDAs and CFGs

 

Oct. 21

Context-free Pumping Theorem

 

Closure properties of context-free languages

 

 

Deterministic context-free languages

 

Oct. 28

Decision procedures for context-free languages

 

Turing machines

 

Multiple tapes and nondeterminism

 

Nov. 4

Simulating real computers

Tuesday evening: Midterm 2

The Universal Turing machine

 

Church’s Thesis

 

Other computational models

 

The unsolvability of the halting problem

 

Nov. 11

Decidable and semidecidable languages

 

Reduction proofs for undecidability

 

Nov. 18

More on reduction proofs

 

Rice’s Theorem

 

Reduction proofs for nonsemidecidability

 

Nov. 25

More on reduction proofs

 

Other undecidable problems

 

THANKSGIVING

 

Dec. 2

The Chomsky hierarchy

 

Review