Notes are posted as Jupyter notebooks. If you want to fiddle with the examples, install Tock, clone the Git repository, and run jupyter notebook in your working copy.
Links that are grayed out point to notes and assignments from Spring 2018.
Unless otherwise indicated, each assignment is due on Friday at 5pm of the week in which it is listed.
| Unit | Week of | Topic | Assignment Due |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01/14 | Introduction and background | ||
| I | 01/21 | Finite automata | HW1 |
| 01/28 | Regular expressions | HW2 | |
| 02/04 | Non-regular languages | CP1 | |
| 02/11 | Review and midterm | ||
| II | 02/18 | Context free grammars, pushdown automata | HW3 |
| 02/25 | CFG = PDA and LL parsing | HW4 | |
| 03/03 | Non-context-free languages | CP2 | |
| Spring break | |||
| III | 03/24 | Turing machines | HW5 |
| 03/31 | The universal TM and undecidability | HW6 | |
| 04/07 Holy Week |
Reducibility | CP3 | |
| IV | 04/14 | P and NP | HW7 |
| 04/21 | NP-completeness | CP4 | |
| 04/28 | Review | HW8 | |
| 05/07 10:30am | Final exam | ||
| Component | Points |
|---|---|
| Homework (HW) | 8 × 30 |
| Course project (CP) | 4 × 30 |
| Midterm exam (ME) | 60 |
| Final exam (FE) | 120 |
| Total | 540 |
| Grade | Points |
|---|---|
| A A− | 504–540 486–503 |
| B+ B B− | 468–485 450–467 432–449 |
| C+ C C− | 414–431 396–413 378–395 |
| D | 324–377 |
| F | 0–323 |
Throughout the semester, you will implement some of the ideas you've learned in a series of text-processing tools.
Michael Sipser, Introduction to the Theory of Computation
<regex>) or Python (including all standard libraries except re). Python is recommended. You can also write in another language with permission from the instructor.In Project 1, you'll implement nondeterministic finite automata (NFA). Nondeterminism (essentially, unbounded parallelism) is one of the core concepts in the course, and implementing it will demonstrate how to simulate nondeterminism on deterministic hardware.
In Project 2, you'll write a parser for regular expressions and combine it with NFAs to build a regular expression matcher like grep. Your implementation will be asymptotically much faster than an implementation that uses Perl or Python's built-in regular expressions.
In Project 3, you'll use your regular expression engine to implement a fragment of sed. You'll also show how, in principle, any computer program could be compiled into this fragment of sed.
In Project 4, you'll extend your regular expression matcher to handle backreferences. You'll show how this extended matcher can be used to (slowly) solve the Boolean satisfiability problem and therefore any problem in NP.
Students are expected to attend all classes. Foreseeable unexcused absences should be discussed with the instructor ahead of time.
For excused absences (including job interviews), coursework submissions will be accepted late by the same number of days as the excused absence.
Otherwise, you may submit some problems on time for full credit, and other problems late for a penalty. No problem can be submitted more than once. The late penalty is 10% per day, rounded down to the nearest point, and (starting after spring break:) only applies after a grace period of 24 hours. That is, the credit you receive is ⌊0.9d×(max(0,s−1)+1)⌋, where s is the possibly fractional number of days late.
All course materials written by the instructor and published on this website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which prohibits reuse for commercial purposes.
All course materials written by the instructor and distributed privately (including through Sakai) should not be redistributed in any way; doing so is a violation of both US copyright law and the University of Notre Dame Honor Code.
Students in this course are expected to abide by the Academic Code of Honor Pledge: “As a member of the Notre Dame community, I will not participate in or tolerate academic dishonesty.”
The following table summarizes how you may work with other students and use print/online sources:
| Resources | Solutions | |
|---|---|---|
| Consulting | allowed | not allowed |
| Copying | cite | not allowed |
If an instructor sees behavior that is, in his judgement, academically dishonest, he is required to file either an Honor Code Violation Report or a formal report to the College of Engineering Honesty Committee.
Any student who has a documented disability and is registered with Disability Services should speak with the professor as soon as possible regarding accommodations. Students who are not registered should contact the Office of Disability Services.
 | The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing by Martin Davis. Short biographies of the pioneers of computability theory and their contributions. |
 | The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold. Contains the text of Turing's 1936 paper with detailed and understandable commentary. |
 | Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Christos Papadimitriou. Graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and the foundations of mathematics. |
 | The Golden Ticket by Lance Fortnow. Popular account of P and NP and the history and future of the question. |