CSE 322 : Introduction to Formal Models in Computer Science

Autumn 1997

Course Organization and Syllabus

 

Instructor:

Paul Young

211 Sieg Hall, 543-4229

young@cs.washington.edu

Office Hours:

MW 11:30-12:30*

*By appointment in class or e-mail prior to class. Also by appointment with more advanced notice at other times, or you can try just dropping in.

 

TA:

Geoff Hulten

104 Chateau, 616-1843

ghulten@cs.washington.edu

Office Hours: 

TH 1:30-2:30 in 326a Sieg*

*I'll be there at the start of the hour, but if people don't show up I may return to my office in the Chateau. If you get to 326a and I'm not there, send me some email and I'll hurry over.

 

 

Class Time & Place: MWF 10:30-11:20; MEB 242 (unless room can be changed)

Final Exam: Friday, Dec 12 from 8:30 to10:20

Prerequisites: CSE321

Text: Sipser, Introduction to the Theory of Computation, PWS Publishing, 1997. There is an errata to the text book at: http://www-math.mit.edu/~sipser/itoc-errs1.1.html. Also, two additional text references will be on reserve in the engineering library: Sudkamp, Languages and Machines, and Hopcroft and Ullman, Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation.

Grading: There will be written homework assignments (about weekly), two midterms quizzes, and a final exam. (Relative weights will be approximately 45%, 15%, 15%, and 25%, respectively.) (Possible dates for midterms are October 27 and November 24.)

Course Announcements: You will be responsible for all administrative announcements made in class. Most of these will be repeated either in class e-mail or on the class web page which is located at: http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/322/CurrentQtr/ and you will also be responsible for reading class e-mail and checking the class web site on a regular basis.

Reading Assignments: We'll go through the material in the beginning chapters of Sipser pretty much in order: Chapter 0 is a review of material covered in CSE321, and you should do it quickly pretty much on your own. We'll do Chapters 1 and 2 pretty thoroughly, beginning the first week of classes. I'll try to announce at the end of each class period what we'll be covering the next period, and you should then begin trying to read that material before class, rereading it more carefully and doing appropriate homework exercises after the class in which the material is discussed. You should maintain responsibility for keeping your reading and your work on homework current with class discussions.

Outline: Core material outlined below usually constitutes most of the course work. Some selection of optional material marked below or other topics fills the rest.

  1. Alphabets, strings, languages; operations on them.
  2. Ways of formally defining models; states, transitions, acceptance, etc.; nondeterminism.
  3. Finite Automata and Regular Expressions (4-5 weeks).
  4. Context-Free Grammars and Pushdown Automata (4-5 weeks).
  5. Optional: Turing Machines and Decidability (1-2 weeks; this material is covered in more depth in 431)
  6. Optional: general phrase-structure and context-sensitive grammars, Chomsky hierarchy.