Overview

• Course Staff

• Schedule and Readings

• Piazza Forum

Assessment

Your work will be assessed through three mechanisms: exercises, problem sets, and exams. Grades will be determined as follows:

• Exercises: 20%

• Problem sets: 30%

• Exams: 50%

Exercises

You may collaborate with as many other students in the class as you like on the exercises. You must write up your solutions on your own. Exercises will be collected at the beginning of class on the day they're due and checked off for completeness but individual problems will not be graded for correctness. (These do still count toward your grade, so make sure you do them all.)

It is recommended, but not required, that you write up your exercise solutions in LaTeX (see below). A LaTeX template for exercises #1 is here.

Solutions to the exercises (including the LaTeX source) will be available on Piazza after the due date.

• Exercises #1: Sipser 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7
  Due: Thursday, September 3, 2015.

• Exercises #2: Sipser 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4ce, 1.5cg, 1.7abcdg
  Due: Tuesday, September 15, 2015.

• Exercises #3: Sipser 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, 2.6, 2.13, 2.14, 2.17
  Due: Tuesday, October 13, 2015

• Exercises #4: Sipser 3.4, 3.5, build TMs in JFLAP for 3.8, 3.11
  Due: Tuesday, November 10, 2015.

• Exercises #5: Sipser 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.9, 5.10, 5.11
  Due: Tuesday, November 24, 2015.

Problem sets

You must solve the problem sets on your own, without discussing them with anyone other than course staff. You must write up your solutions on your own. Further, solutions to problem sets must be written in LaTeX (see below). Problem sets are to be turned in as PDFs on Blackboard and will be graded for correctness.

• Problem set #1: ps1.pdf
  Due: Tuesday, September 22, 2015 at 23:59

• Problem set #2: ps2.pdf
  Due: Tuesday, October 20, 2015 at 23:59

• Problem set #3: ps3.pdf
  Due: Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at 23:59

• Problem set #4: TBA
  Due: Friday, Dec 4, 2015 at 23:59

Exams

There are two, 75-minute, in-class exams at the times listed above. Each in-class exam is worth 12.5% of your grade. There is a final exam worth 25% of your grade that will be given on the scheduled final exam day. The exams are closed book; however, you are allowed to bring in one sheet of 8.5" by 11" paper filled on both sides with any information you think you'll need.

Any student who does not take the final exam will fail the course. There will be no makeup exams.

LaTeX and JFLAP

There are two tools that you will be using throughout this course, LaTeX and JFLAP.

LaTeX is a typesetting system which you will use to write up solutions to the problem sets. Here is an example proof written in LaTeX. Here is the LaTeX source.

LaTeX distributions are available for OS X, *NIX, and Windows:

• TeX Live (all systems)

• MacTeX (Mac OS X; essentially TeX Live with some extras)

• MiKTeX (Windows)

There are a number of good references on the Web including

• The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2e Good introduction.

• User's Guide for the amsmath Package Documentation for mathematical environments.

• TeX StackExchange Q&A site.

• Our Piazza Forum.

There are many tools that can assist in writing LaTeX, including a variety of specialized editors such as Texmaker and TeXShop as well as add ons for editors like Emacs (AUCTeX is probably the best of them) and Vim.

Writing your solutions in LaTeX will take time at first, but as you become more familiar with it, you'll find that it's an invaluable tool. I strongly recommend you learn to use it well.

JFLAP is software that you may use for building some of the machines we will be discussing such as DFAs and Turing machines. Nothing in the class requires you to use the software, but I recommend it. It's a good way to test your solutions before turning them in.

You can also using JFLAP as an easy way to produce diagrams for your DFAs, NFAs, etc. that you can then save as PDF and include as graphics in your problem sets (and exercises). There is a tutorial as well.