CISC 303  -   Automata Theory  -  Spring 2015

Instructor: Daniel Chester	TA: Wei Wang
Office: 101G Smith Hall	Office: 201 Smith Hall
Hours: M/Th 3:35 pm-4:30 pm and by appt.	Hours: Tu 10:00 am-noon
Phone: 831-1955	Phone: none
Email: User: chester Domain: udel.edu	Email: User: weiwang Domain: udel.edu

Textbook

Course Description

Topics (tentative, not necessarily in the order to be covered)

• Introduction


• Finite State Machines and Regular Sets: Deterministic and non-deterministic finite state automata, closure properties, regular expressions, pumping lemma, Myhill-Nerode Theorem and state minimization.


• Pushdown Machines and Context-free Languages: Deterministic and non-deterministic pushdown automata, context-free grammars, pumping lemma.


• Turing Machines and Effective Computability: Turing machines and models of computation, universal machine, decidable and undecidable problems.

Grading

• homework assignments


• midterm Wednesday, March 25, 2015


• final exam Wednesday, May 27, 2015, 1 pm in MKL061

The numerical scores will be combined, not the letter grades. Since the assignments and exams are not standardized, your course grade will depend not only on the weighted score you receive, but also on how your score compares with the score distribution for the whole class.

Policies

• All assignments are due at the beginning of class on the due date. They must be printed, not handwritten, and given to me in class on the due date. Do not email your work to the TA or me unless I give you instructions to do so.
• Homework will be accepted after the due date, but the score will be reduced by 10 percent of the maximum possible score. The homework will not be accepted more than one week after the due date except in extreme and verifiable circumstances.
• All work on assignments must be your own. Do not collaborate with other students or copy their work. Do not copy from a book or other source. You may consult with each other about conceptual problems, but see the TA or me for help with details or debugging.

  If you get text or code from any source, including webpages on the Internet, books or other students, and present it as if it were your own, that is plagiarism. If the TA or I discover that you have plagiarized, I am obligated to report the incident to University authorities above the CIS Department. You must acknowledge and document such borrowings if you do use them. If they significantly reduce the amount of work you have to do for an assignment, you will lose points; the grade you get is for your work, not somebody else's.

• If you can't come to scheduled office hours, please send me email; I'll be happy to schedule a meeting at some other mutually-agreed-upon time.