Introduction to Computer Science Theory Final
Date, time, and location
Tuesday, November 17, 12:30-2:30pm, room 70-1620.
Tutoring
The tutoring schedule for finals week is:
- Mon: 10am-1pm (Sudarshan)
- Tue: 10am-2pm (Barath)
- Wed: 2pm-6pm (Curtis)
Curtis will hold a final review on Sunday at 2pm, in room 70-3435.
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 3-5, 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
- Context-free grammars: 6.1, 6.2, 6.4, 6.5, and notes
- Pushdown automata: 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, and notes
- Context-free and noncontext-free languages:
8.1, 8.2, 8.3, and notes
- Turing machines: 9.1, 9.7, and notes; skim the rest of chapter 9.
- Recursive and recursively enumerable languages: notes
- Chomsky hierarchy: notes
- Decidability and undecidability: notes
- Complexity: notes
Notes
-
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.
-
Like the midterm, the final will consist of five questions
of equal weight.
Your lowest question score won't count.
-
The final can not be made up except for real emergencies in which case
proper documentation (like a doctor's note) will be required.
You should notify me of your absence as soon as possible (in almost
all cases, this will be well before the final). The make-up final may
take the form of an oral exam.
Swine flu sufferers without documentation: You need to contact me
as soon as possible, and certainly well before the final, to let me know
that you have the swine flu.
-
Calculators, cell phones, PDAs etc. are not allowed.
You may only leave the room after you turn in your exam.
-
The final is worth 30% of your course grade. If your final score is higher than the midterm score, then the midterm accounts for 25%
and the final for 35% of your course grade.
-
To get some idea of the format of the final and the level of
difficulty of the questions, you can look at
some sample questions.
This is just to get some idea. The sample questions do 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.
- Note about the sample questions: the Procedures of the Theory Final part was written for a different section of the course.
We will follow the same procedures as for the midterm exam.
-
New:Here are answers to the practice problems.