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COMS W3261 Computer Science Theory Fall 2011 |
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| Announcements | |||||||||||||||||||
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Class meets 1:10-2:25pm, Mondays and Wednesdays, 209 Havemeyer. Courseworks class bulletin board is at https://courseworks.columbia.edu Homework Assignment #3 is now posted on Courseworks/COMS W3261/Assignments. It is due in class, 1:10pm, Monday, November 21, 2011. Final: Monday, December 12, 2011 (in class) |
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| Teaching Staff | |||||||||||||||||||
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| Course Overview | |||||||||||||||||||
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In Computer Science Theory you will learn computational thinking
and get to know the fundamental models of computation that underly
computer hardware, software, and programming languages.
You will also discover that there are limits on how quickly computers
can solve some problems and that there are some
problems that no computer can solve.
The course will cover the important formal languages in the Chomsky hierarchy -- the regular sets, the context-free languages, and the recursively enumerable sets -- as well as the formalisms that generate these languages and the machines that recognize them. The course will also introduce the basic concepts of computability and complexity theory by focusing on the question, "What are the fundamental capabilities and limitations of computers?" The concepts covered in this course will be amply illustrated by applications to current programming languages, algorithms, natural language processing, and hardware and software design. |
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| Pre- or Corequisites | |||||||||||||||||||
| COMS W3137 Data Structures and Algorithms | |||||||||||||||||||
| COMS W3203 Discrete Mathematics | |||||||||||||||||||
| Schedule 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||
| Required Text | |||||||||||||||||||
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John E. Hopcroft, Rajeev Motwani, and Jeffrey D. Ullman Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, Third Edition Pearson/Addison-Wesley, 2007, ISBN 0-321-45536-3 |
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| Additional References | |||||||||||||||||||
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Michael Sipser Introduction to the Theory of Computation, Second Edition Thomson, 2006 |
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Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman Foundations of Computer Science, C Edition W. H. Freeman, 1995 An online version of this book is available here. |
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| Class Policies | |||||||||||||||||||
| Grading |
30 % Homeworks 30 % Midterm 40 % Final |
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| aho@cs.columbia.edu | Updated September 7, 2011 |