CS341H  Automata Theory - Honors
Elaine Rich

Schedule of Classes

 

Week

Topics

 

Jan. 15

The big picture

 

What is a language?

 

Finite state machines

 

Jan. 22

Nondeterministic finite state machines

 

Finite state transducers

 

HMMs and their applications

 

Jan. 29

Büchi automata

 

Regular expressions

 

Equivalence of regular expressions and FSMs

 

Regular grammars

 

Feb. 5

Closure properties of regular languages

 

Regular Pumping Theorem

 

Decision procedures for regular languages

 

Feb.12

Context-free grammars

 

Parse trees

 

Ambiguity

 

Feb.19

Grammars and normal forms

Tuesday evening: Midterm 1

Pushdown automata

 

Equivalence of PDAs and CFGs

 

Feb. 26

Context-Free Pumping Theorem

 

Closure properties of context-free languages

 

March 4

Deterministic context-free languages

 

Parikh’s Theorem

 

Decision procedures for context-free languages

 

Turing machines

 

March 11

SPRING BREAK

 

March 18

Multiple tapes and nondeterminism

 

Simulating real computers

 

The Universal Turing machine

 

Church’s Thesis

 

Other computational models

 

The unsolvability of the halting problem

 

March 25

Decidable and semidecidable languages

Tuesday evening: Midterm 2

Reduction proofs for undecidability

 

April 1

Rice’s Theorem

 

Reduction proofs for nonsemidecidability

 

April 8

Other undecidable problems

 

Context-sensitive languages

 

The Chomsky hierarchy

 

April 15

Introduction to complexity theory

 

Review of asymptotic dominance

 

Measuring time and space complexity

 

P and NP

 

April 22

Using reduction for complexity

 

NP-completeness and the Cook-Levin Theorem

 

Other NP-complete problems

 

April 29

Space complexity

 

Practical solutions for hard problems