Course Topics

-- Subject to change without notice --

• Introduction.
  • What is the subject matter of this course?
  • Alphabets, strings, languages.

  • A bit about different notions of infinity: countable and uncountable.

• Finite Automata.
  • Deterministic Finite Automata.
  • Nondeterministic Finite Automata.
  • Regular expressions.
  • Showing that a language is not regular.

• Context-Free Languages.
  • Context-Free Grammars.
  • Pushdown Automata.
  • Parsing (not in text).

• Turing machines and computability theory.
  • Turing machines.
  • Basic undecidability (halting problem).
  • More undecidability: Reductions.
  • Rice's Theorem (not in text).

  • The recursion theorem with an application to computer viruses.

• As time allows: Introduction to complexity theory: P and NP.