Instructor:
Shunichi Toida, Professor
Department of Computer Science, ODU
Office: Room 252-4, Education
Phone: 683-3392
Textbook:
John C. Martin,
Introduction to Languages and
the Theory
of Computation,
3rd ed.,
McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 2003.
Prerequisite:
CS 381 (formerly CS 281) Introduction to Discrete Structures
This prerequisite is a must.
MATH 163 (Pre-Calculus II) or equivalent.
Calculus is preferred but not required.
Grading:
| Homework | 20% | ||
| Test x 1 | 40% | ||
| Final Exam | 40% |
Lying, cheating, plagiarism and failure to report such cases
all constitute
violation of the Honor System.
Office Hours:
Mondays and Wednesdays 4:00p.m. - 5:00p.m.
You may also walk in any other time. My door is always open.
Final Exam :
9:00a.m. - 11:30a.m., Saturday, May 1, 2004
Course Objectives:
The main objective of this course is to study the
concept of computation and limitations of computer and computation.
By rigorously expressing the
concept of computation, one can characterize problems
which are solvable using computers, solvable but hard
to solve or relatively easy to solve without referring
to any specific computer.
In the process, important subjects (practically as well
as theoretically) such as finite automata, Turing
machines, regular languages and context-free languages
are introduced and studied.
It is also an important objective of this course that
we train ourselves in logical thinking and problem solving.
Finally it is also hoped that we become able
to read rigorous technical articles.
Course Contents:
First basic mathematics involving relations,
functions, mathematical induction and recursive
definitions, which are given in Chapters 1 and 2, are reviewed.
Then in Chapters 3 - 5, one of the practically
important classes of languages - regular languages - is
studied along with finite automata which process them. Following that,
another important class - context-free languages - and
push-down automata presented in Chapters 6 and 7 are
briefly looked at. The theory of regular languages and
context-free languages is heavily used in the design
of compilers for high level programming languages.
Then the key mathematical model for computation -
Turing machine - presented in Chapter 9 is
studied. It is known that any computer is as
powerful as a Turing machine. Also it is conjectured
(and generally accepted) that any so called "computation" is
a computation by a Turing machine with appropriate
built-in rules. Finally, using the concepts of computation and Turing
machine, it is shown that there are problems which can
not be solved by any computer, which is discussed in
Chapter 11.