4003-389 Honors Introduction to Computer Science Theory: Final Exam
When and Where
Thursday, November 17, 12:30am-2:30pm, room GOL(70)-3560.
Reviews
Wednesday, November 16, 12:30-1:30pm, room GOL(70)-1610. If this time does not work for you, I will hold review sessions for the regular sections at 11-12 and 1:30-2:30 (see their final exam info website for more details).
If none of the times works for you, please let me know. If there is interest,
I will try to arrange for an evening review session by Zach Langley (one of our CS theory tutors).
Office Hours
Wednesday, November 16, right before the review sessions for 15 minutes to take care of any possible outstanding grading discrepancies.
I will not hold my regular office hours during the finals week due to a scheduling conflict.
Tutoring
The tutoring schedule for finals week: Mon 1-4pm, Tue 2-4pm and 6-7pm, and Wed 1-4pm
The center will not follow the regular schedule.
Important
Make sure that you handle all grading issues by Wednesday!
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 Chapter 1, but not the details.
For example, you should know that NFAs are equivalent to DFAs, but
you will not be required to apply the subset construction.
New stuff
You should have a good idea about the proofs from class but I will not ask you
to reconstruct them. You might be asked to prove similar statements to those on
the homeworks (e.g., apply the pumping lemma).
- Context-free languages: Chapter 2
- Turing machines: Chapter 3
- Decidability: Section 4.1
- Undecidability: Section 4.2, then Chapter 5
- Reducibility: Chapter 5
- Time Complexity: Chapter 7
As a general rule, you need to know only the material that we covered in class or was assigned on the homeworks. This mean the entire Chapter 2,
Chapter 3, and Chapter 4. As for Chapters 5 and 7, you should know the material that was covered in class (see the 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.
- Additionally, you may bring your midterm "help-sheet".
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Like the midterm, the final will consist of five questions
of equal weight.
Your lowest question score won't count.
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There will also be a bonus problem. There is no partial credit for the bonus problem.
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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.
You should notify me of your absence as soon as possible (in almost
all cases, this will be well before the final).
Oversleeping, cars that don't start etc. do not constitute a valid excuse.
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Use of calculators, cell phones, PDAs etc. is not allowed. You may set your electronic device to show the current time (but you are not allowed to touch the device during the exam).
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You may only leave the room after you turn in your exam.
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The final is worth 30% of your course grade. (Or 35% if your score is higher than your midterm's score.)
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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
some sample final 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
they do not guarantee the exact level of difficulty
of the questions on your final.
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And here will appear the
sample final questions with
answers. I had troubles embedding the latest pictures into the pdf so for now the following pictures are separate: QA.jpg, reductionUndecidable.jpg, and reductionNP.jpg.
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Here is the list of problems I prepared for the final exam review. (I did not go through all.)
