This page contains information for the course CS 457, Automata Theory and Computability, that I am teaching during the Spring Semester 2006 at York College. There is also my general teaching page for information on what I tought previously. An overview over the material covered so far with reading assingments can be found on a seperate page. For your convenience here is a pointer to the most recent lecture and the next upcoming lecture.
Announcements
- Course Structure
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This course will be run in more of a seminar style as opposed to
the traditional lecture format. You will do most of your initial
learning through your own independent research. You will then
discuss your finding with the instructor and we will collect the
results and elaborate on them during the lecture.
Expect to invest approximately 8 hours each week of your own time for this course - this is in addition to the lectures!
On Wednesdays the entire class will meet during the regular class hours to discuss our findings. On Mondays you will have a fixed appointment with the instructor to discuss you research one-on-one (or in a small group).
- Class Times
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Lecture:
Wednesdays, 3:00 - 5:50 PM in AC-2B04 -
Meeting with instructor:
Regular meeting time will be assigned to you for Mondays, 3:00 - 5:50 PM in AC-2C07c
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Lecture:
- Instructor
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- Detlef Ronneburger
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E-mail
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Office: AC-2C07c
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Office Hours:
Mondays, 3:00 - 4:00 pm and 5:30-6:30 pm
Wednesdays, 12:00 - 1:00 pm, and by appointment
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Phone:
718-262-2545 (Mondays and Wednesdays)
732-810-1614 (Tuesdays and Thursdays)
- Grading Policy
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20% Attendance / Participation / Lecture Summaries
+ 40% Homework
+ 40% Research reports
+ 0% Begging
+ 0% Bribing
- Required Course Work
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- Regular attendance is required (see Syllabus for attendance policy)
- Weekly subject research and discussion
- Weekly 1/2 hour meeting with instructor in study group
- Weekly homework assignments
- Three written research reports
- Exams
- This course will not have any exams. You will be grades based on your HW assignments as well as your research reports.
- Textbook(s)
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There will not be any required textbooks for this course.
Several books on the topics will be available in the library
on reserve.
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Introduction to Theory of Computation
by Michael Sipser
Publisher: PWS Publishing Company
This book is very well written and very commonly used. A second edition just came out recently, but it does not differ much from the first edition. The philosophy of this book is to be "crisp and clear" which it definitely achieves. Instead of length formal arguements, the author tries to emphasise intuition. Instead of using a lot of mathemtatical notation, he uses written English where possible. A possible drawback is that it does not provide too much background information and it does not provide many examples. The book is expensive, but there is a fairly reasonable international version on the market.
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Introduction to Automata Theory,
Languages and Computation, 2nd Edition
by John Hopcroft, Rajeev Motwani, and Jeffrey Ullman
Publisher: Addison Weseley
This is a new version of the classic standard. It provides more examples and details than Sipser's book, but at times it seems a littlebit cluttered.
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Automata and Computability
by Dexter C. Kozen
Publisher: Springer
This book is mathematically very precise, which makes it a little hard to read.
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Languages and Machines, 3rd edition
by Thomas A Sudkamp
Publisher: Addison Wesley
This book is quite well written with several good examples. Overall it seems fairly clear, providing enough details. It presents matters in a slightly different order than we will use, but overall it seems like a very good book.
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Introduction to Theory of Computation
- Handouts
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Syllabus
Please read the syllabus carefully for all course policies - in particular with regard to late submissions, attendance, and academic integrity.
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Syllabus
- Homework Assignments
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- Homework 1 will be due on 2/8/2006.
- Homework 2 will be due on 2/22/2006.
- Homework 3 will be due on 3/13/2006.
- Topic Summaries
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Summary on Regular Expression
Write a summary about what we covered on Regular Languages. In it you should mention deterministic and nondeterministic finite state machines, regular expression. Explain how each of them work. Try to talk about the ideas and concepts so that they can be understood by somebody who has not taken the course.
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Summary on Regular Expression
- Links
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JFLAP
This is a fee software tool that allows you to simulate finite state machines and other formalism we will study in this course.
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JFLAP
