ECS 120 - Spring 2007 - List of Lecture Topics

Lecture Topic
Week 0 Lect 01 - W 3/28 Introduction. Three sample problems and their relative complexities. Basic definitions. Alphabet, strings.
Lect xx - F 3/30 Holiday, no class. But a film, optional, The Fight in the Fields, was shown instead, in honor of Cesar Chavez's birthday.
Week 1 Lect 02 - M 4/02 Finish definitions for languages and strings. Basic operations: concatenation, star, union, intersection. First examples of DFAs.
Lect 03 - W 4/04 More examples of DFAs. Formal definition of a DFA. Definition of the language accepted by a DFA.
Lect 04 - F 4/06 NFAs (orange DFAs). Formal definitions. The DFA-acceptable languages are closed under complement.
Week 2 Lect 05 - M 4/09 Quiz 1. Bhume lectures. NFAs accept exactly the DFA-acceptable languages: the subset construction.
Lect 06 - W 4/11 Eliminating \e-transitions. Formal definition for an NFA accepting a string. Some properties. The product construction.
Lect 07 - F 4/13 Closure properties, continued: Kleene-closure, concatenation, reversal. Regular languages.
Week 3 Lect 08 - M 4/16 Regular expressions and their semantics. Regular languages are exactly the DFA/NFA acceptable languages (a conversion procedure).
Lect 09 - W 4/18 Proving languages are not regular: pigeonhole arguments. Proving minimality of a DFA.
Lect 10 - F 4/20 The pumping lemma for regular languages: proof and applications. Closure properties for proving language not regular.
Week 4 Lect 11 - M 4/23 Quiz 2. Example for why converse of PL is false. Decision procedures for regular languages.
Lect 12 - W 4/25 Review of lectures 1-11 (because of poor Quiz 2 results). Additional regular-language decision procedures.
Lect 13 - F 4/27 Dog day. A last decision procedure. Vocabulary and examples for Context Free Languages.
Week 5 Lect 14 - M 4/30 Formal definitions for CFLs, their languages, and ambiguity. More practice. Regular languages are CF.
Lect 15 - W 5/02 Review of CFLs and ambiguity. PDAs and their formalization. Examples.
Lect xx - R 5/03 Midterm review, 1344 Storer, 6-8 pm.
Lect 16 - F 5/04 Midterm! Midterm! Midterm! Midterm! Midterm! Midterm! Midterm! Midterm! Midterm!
Week 6 Lect 17 - M 5/07 L is context-free implies L has a PDA. Chomsky Normal Form conversions. Return the midterm.
Lect 18 - W 5/09 A pumping lemma for CFLs. CFLs are not closed under complement or interseection.
Lect 19 - F 5/11 Cat Day. CFLs are closed under intersection with regular languages. CFL decision procedures. Turing machines.
Week 7 Lect 20 - M 5/14 Formal definitions and for recursive (decidable) r.e. (Turing-acceptable) languages. An example TM.
Lect 21 - W 5/16 Review. Alternative TM models: multi-track, multi-head, multi-tape TMs; RAMs; unrestricted grammars.
Lect 22 - F 5/18 Unrestricted grammars, cont. Nondeterministic TMs. The Church-Turing Thesis. Arguments for and against (incomplete).
Week 8 Lect 23 - M 5/21 Quiz 3. Arguments for and against the CT thesis. Four-possiblities theorem. Classification.
Lect 24 - W 5/23 The undecidability of A_TM. Turing-computable functions. Definition of many-one reductions. Example reductions..
Lect 25 - F 5/25 Reduction-day: example reductions, for the entire lecture. Most interesting was ALLCFG (p. 197 of book, but slightly simpler).
Week 9 Lect xx - M 5/28 Memorial Day - no class
Lect 26 - W 5/30 The prevalence of undecidability in computing. The complexity class P.
Lect 27 - F 6/01 The complexity class NP and example languages EULARIAN, SAT, 3SAT, CLIQUE, and NFAEQ
Week 10 Lect 28 - M 6/04 NP-Completeness. A sample reduction.
Lect 29 - W 6/06 More reductions (a HW problems and G3C). Proof of the Cook-Levin Theorem.
Lect 30 - F 6/08 Alright, who stole Lect 30? There are supposed to be 30 lectures in a term. You should feel cheated.
Week 11 Lect xx - R 6/14 Final - 8 am to 10 am in 119 Wellman - Good luck!