Lecture Schedule

Date Subject Resources
Week 1, Jan 9-12 Course introduction and background. Review of notation. Introduction to deterministic finite automata (DFA)
Week 2, Jan 16-19 DFA's continued. Introduction to non-determinism and non-deterministic finite automata (NFA)
Week 3, Jan 23-26 NFA's continued. Equivalence of DFAs and NFAs.
Week 4, Jan 30-Feb 2 Closure properties of regular languages. Regular expressions. Pumping lemma for regular languages.
Week 5, Feb 6-9 Introduction to context-free grammars (CFG)
Week 6, Feb 13-16 Introduction to push-down automata (PDA). Pumping lemma for CFGs. Midterm during Thursday's tutorial session (Covering all materials from Weeks 1-5).
Feb 20-23 Reading week. No class.
  • N/A
Week 7, Feb 27-Mar 2 Introduction to Turing machines (TM). TM examples.
Week 8, Mar 6-9 The Church-Turing Thesis. Decidability and Decidable languages.
Week 9, Mar 13-16 Universal Turing machines. The halting problem and other undecidable languages.
Week 10, Mar 20-23 Computational complexity and running time. Complexity classes P and NP.
Week 11, Mar 27-30 The class NP-Complete. The Cook-Levin Theorem and the million dollar question... does P=NP?
Week 12, Apr 3-6 The class NP-Hard. Probabilistic Turing machines and the class BPP. Quantum computers and the class BQP.
Week 13, Apr 10 Exam review