CS420: Intro to Theory of Computation
UMass Boston, Fall 2020
Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:30:00 -0500
NOTE: Homework 10 has an extended due date.
Thu, 12 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0500
Dennis’s Office Hours has been changed to Tuesday at 11am.
Wed, 11 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0500
Lecture on Monday, November 16 will be more interactive and involve coding demos, from both instructor and students. Come to class prepared to write code.
Tue, 10 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0500
No class Wed November 11 (Veteran’s Day).
Thu, 5 Nov 2020 12:00:00 -0500
For those working pairs, a change of partner is required, beginning with Homework 7. See the announcement in Piazza for more details.
Sun, 11 Oct 2020 12:00:00 -0400
No class Mon October 12 (Columbus Day).
Wed, 7 Oct 2020 12:00:00 -0400
Homework 4 is out and is due in two weeks on Tues Oct 20, 11:59pm EST.
Mon, 5 Oct 2020 17:30:00 -0400
The solution to the (second) in-class exercise from today is can be viewed here.
Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0400
The deadline for Homework 3 has been extended to Sunday Oct 11, 11:59pm EST.
Mon, 14 Sep 2020 17:30:00 -0400
The solution to the in-class exercise from today is can be viewed here.
Fri, 28 Aug 2020 16:37:00 -0400
Hi Students,
Welcome to CS420! I am looking forward to the semester.
Please fill out the pre-class survey before the first class (Wed Sept 9).
(Enter your umb.edu credentials into the Google sign in box to access the survey.)
Remote learning can be tough so this will help me better tailor the course to each of you.
have taken CS 110 and CS 220; and
be able to write basic programs independently, in a language of your choice.
The above includes being able to set up your own development environment and write basic build scripts (Homework 0 will guide everyone through the specific requirements).
See you in the first class!
Last updated: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 13:30:51 -0500
Schedule (subject to change):
Lectures meet MW 4-5:15pm via Zoom.
# | Date | Topic | Reading | HW out |
1 | 9/9 Wed | Intro [slides] | Ch 0 | |
2 | 9/14 Mon | Deterministic Finite Automata (DFAs) [slides] | 1.1 | |
3 | 9/16 Wed | Closed Operations on Regular Langs [slides] | 1.1 | |
4 | 9/21 Mon | Nondeterminism and NFAs [slides] | 1.2 | |
5 | 9/23 Wed | NFA -> DFA, NFA -> Reg Exprs [slides] | 1.2 | |
6 | 9/28 Mon | More Reg Exprs and Inductive Proofs [slides] | 1.3 | |
7 | 9/30 Wed | Nonregular Langs, Pumping Lemma [slides] | 1.4 | |
8 | 10/5 Mon | Context-free Grammars (CFGs) [slides] | 2.1 | |
9 | 10/7 Wed | Pushdown Automata (PDA), CFG<->PDA [slides] | 2.2 | |
no class | 10/12 Mon | Columbus Day | ||
10 | 10/14 Wed | DCFLS, DPDAs, and Parsing [slides] | 2.4 | |
11 | 10/19 Mon | Non-CFLs and Turing Machines (TMs) [slides] | 2.3,3.1,3.3 | |
12 | 10/21 Wed | More Turing Machines [slides] | 3.2,3.3 | |
13 | 10/26 Mon | Decidability and Regular Langs [slides] | 3.3,4.1 | |
14 | 10/28 Wed | Decidability and CFLs [slides] | 4.1 | |
15 | 11/2 Mon | Diagonalization and Undecidability [slides] | 4.2 | |
16 | 11/4 Wed | Reducibility and the Halting Problem [slides] | 5.1 | |
17 | 11/9 Mon | Mapping Reducibility [slides] | 5.3 | |
no class | 11/11 Wed | Veterans Day | ||
18 | 11/16 Mon | Turing Machines and Recursion [slides] | 6.1 | |
19 | 11/18 Wed | Intro to Time Complexity [slides] | 7.1 | |
20 | 11/23 Mon | Polynomial Time (P) [slides] | 7.2 | |
21 | 11/25 Wed | NP [slides] | 7.3 | |
no class | 11/26 Thu | Thanksgiving Break | ||
22 | 11/30 Mon | P vs NP and NP-Completeness [slides] | 7.4 | |
23 | 12/2 Wed | The Cook-Levin Theorem [slides] | 7.4,7.5 | |
24 | 12/7 Mon | HAMPATH is NP-Complete [slides] | 7.5 | |
25 | 12/9 Wed | More NP-complete Problems [slides] | 7.5 | |
26 | 12/14 Mon | Recap (last class) | all | redos |