Introduction to Computer Science Theory Final
Monday, November 12, 2:45pm-4:45pm, room 70-3435.
Office Hour
The last office hour before the final exam will be on Friday, November 9, 1:30-2:30pm.
Topics
The emphasis of the final is on new stuff (described below)
and on overview questions.
You do need to know the main points of Chapters 1-5, but not the details.
For example, you should know that NFAs are equivalent to FAs, but
you will not be required to apply the subset construction.
New stuff
(You have to do only the proofs that we did in class or on the homework).
- Context-free grammars: 6.1, 6.2, 6.4, 6.5, and slides
- Pushdown automata: 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, and slides
- Context-free and noncontext-free languages:
8.1, 8.2, 8.3, and slides
- Turing machines: 9.1, 9.7, and slides; skim the rest of chapter 9.
- Recursive and recursively enumerable languages: slides
- Chomsky hierarchy: slides
- Decidability and undecidability: slides
- Complexity: slides
Notes
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The final will be closed book and notes,
but you may bring one sheet of letter-sized paper with your own
hand-written notes. You may write on both sides.
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Like the midterm, the final will consist of five or six questions
of equal weight.
Your lowest question score won't count.
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The final can not be made up except for real emergencies in which case
proper documentation (like a doctor's note) will
be required. If at all possible, you should contact me prior to the final.
Oversleeping, cars that don't start etc. do not constitute a valid excuse.
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The final is worth 25% or 30% of your course grade.
However, your course grade will never be more than one letter
grade higher than your average exam grade.
In addition, If your average exam grade is below 55%,
you will fail the course.
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To get some idea of the format of the final and the level of
difficulty of the questions, you can look at
an old final (pdf).
This is just to get some idea. The old final does not guarantee
anything about the topics of the questions on your final and
it does not guarantee the exact level of difficulty
of the questions on your final.
In fact, the old final is a little on the easy side.
The answers to the old final will be distributed in class.