ECS 120 - Winter 2005 - List of Lecture Topics

Lecture Topic
Week 0 Lect 1 - R 1/6 Introduction. Three problems of differing hardness. Strings, operators, languages.
Week 1 Lect 2 - T 1/11 Example DFAs. Formal definitions of DFAs and their languages.
Lect 3 - R 1/13 Using the pigeonhole principle. Closure properties. The product construction.
Week 2 Lect 4 - T 1/18 More on DFA closure properties. NFAs: examples, definitions, closure properties.
Lect 5 - R 1/20 Quiz 1. NFA-acceptable = DFA-acceptable (the subset construction). Regular languages and regular expressions.
Week 3 Lect 6 - T 1/25 Political discussion about the tsunami and its context. Regular languages = NFA-acceptable languages.
Lect 7 - R 1/27 Decision procedures for regular languages. {a^n b^n: n\ge 0} is not regular.
Week 4 Lect 8 - T 2/1 The pumping lemma for regular languages. Applications. Strong pumping lemma. Context free languages.
Lect 9 - R 2/3 Definitions for CFLs. Examples. Ambiguity. CFLs are regular.
Week 5 Lect 10 - T 2/8 Midterm
Lect 11 - R 2/10 Deciding membership in CFLs. Chomsky Normal Form. PDAs.
Week 6 Lect 12 - T 1/15 The PDA-acceptable languages are CF. The pumping lemma for CFLs. Closure (and non-closure) properties.
Lect 13 - R 2/17 Quiz 2. Finish CFLs. Turing machines (examples, definitions).
Week 7 Lect 14 - T 2/22 Turing machine review. Alternative models of computation. The Church-Turing Thesis and the Digital Modeling Thesis.
Lect 15 - R 2/24 Recursive, r.e., and co-r.e. languages. Basic properties of these classes. Language classification guesses.
Week 8 Lect 16 - T 3/1 Prof. Phil owns a tie! A_TM is undecidable. Many-one reductions and their properties. A first reduction.
Lect 17 - R 3/3 Practice doing reductions. Rice's theorem.
Week 9 Lect 18 - T 3/8 Quiz 3. More reductions. The classes P and NP.
Lect 19 - R 3/10 NP-Completeness and its meaning. Doing reductions.
Week 10 Lect 20 - T 3/15 A couple more reductions. Proof of the Cook-Levin Theorem. Students grade me.
Week X M 3/21, 1:30-3:30 pm Final