• Course Description. Formal aspects of describing and recognizing languages by grammars and automata. Parsing regular and context-free languages. Ambiguity, nondeterminism. Elements of computability; Turing machines, random access machines, undecidable problems, NP-completeness.
• Coursework. Coursework will consist of weekly homeworks, midterms, and a comprehensive final exam. The overall grade will be determined 20% from homework, 25% from each midterm, and 30% from the final. Group work on homeworks is permitted, but each student must list his or her collaborators in writing for each problem. If a student turns in a solution without listing the others who helped produce this solution, this act will be considered cheating (for it is plagarism). Late homework assignments will not be accepted.
  
• Exam policy. Exam performance must be 100% individual effort; no collaboration is allowed on exams. Any collaboration or copying on exams will be considered cheating. In addition to the procedures of the ICS Cheating Policy, students caught cheating on exams will be given a failing grade in the class.
• Laptop policy. Open laptop computers and phone usage are not permitted during lectures.
• Text. The course text will be Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, Third Edition, by Hopcroft, Motwani, and Ullman.
• Add/drop policy. Drops will be accepted only up to the first midterm. Once your drop card has been signed, further coursework from you will not be graded. After the seventh week of classes, withdrawals will be allowed only by petition and under documented extenuating circumstances.

Tentative Schedule

• Week 1:
• Regular Languages, finite automata, DFAs, NFAs.
• Week 2:
• Regular expressions, Nonregular languages.
• Week 3:
• Context free grammars. Pushdown automata.
• Week 4:
Midterm I

• Equivalence of CFGs and PDAs.
• Week 5:
• Chomsky Normal Form (CNF). Non-context-free languages. Parsing (CYK Algorithm). Turing machines.
• Week 6:
• Church-Turing Thesis. Decidability.
• Week 7:
Midterm II

• Rice's Theorem.
• Week 8:
• Time complexity. NP-completeness. Cook's Theorem.
• Week 9:
• Polynomial-time reductions. More NP-complete problems.
• Week 10: Space complexity.
  • PSPACE-complete problems.

Copyright © 2014 Michael Goodrich, as to all lectures. Students are prohibited from selling (or being paid for taking) notes during this course to or by any person or commercial firm without the express written permission of the professor teaching this course.