CS 520 - Introduction to Theory of Computing Fall 2006

Lectures

	Date	Topic	Reading
1	9/5	Administrativia & Introduction	Ch 0
2	9/7	Finite automata	§1.1
3	9/12	Regular languages	§1.3
4	9/14	Nondeterministic finite automata	§1.2
5	9/19	Regular languages vs finite automata	§1.2-3
6	9/21	Nonregular languages	§1.4
7	9/26	State reduction	H
8	9/28	State minimization	H
	9/28	The P vs NP Problem and its Place in Complexity Theory, Distinguished Lecture by Stephen Cook, 4-5pm in Eng 1800
9	10/3	Turing machines	§3.1
10	10/5	Church-Turing Thesis	§3.2-3
11	10/10	Decidability	§4.1
12	10/12	Halting problem	§4.2
13	10/17	Reducibility	§5.3
	10/18	The Power and Weakness of Randomness in Computation, Distinguished Lecture by Avi Wigderson, 4-5pm in CS 1221
14	10/19	Undecidable problems	§5.1
15	10/24	Post's correspondence problem	§5.2
16	10/26	Time complexity and the class P	§7.1-2
17	10/31	The class NP	§7.3
18	11/2	NP-completeness	§7.4
19	11/7	Satisfiability	§6.3,9.3
	11/8	Why NP got a new definition: the quest to understand the approximation properties of NP-hard optimization problems, Distinguished Lecture by Sanjeev Arora, 4-5pm in CS 1221
20	11/9	NP-complete problems	§7.5
21	11/14	More NP-complete problems	§7.5
	11/15	Modelling Errors and Recovery for Communication, Distinguished Lecture by Madhu Sudan, 4-5pm in CS 1221
22	11/16	Coping with NP-completeness
23	11/21	Space complexity and the class PSPACE	§8.1-3
24	11/28	The class NL	§8.4-5
	11/29	Biology as Computation, Distinguished Lecture by Leslie Valiant, 4-5pm in CS 1221
25	11/30	NL is closed under complement	§8.6
26	12/5	Uses of randomness in computation	§10.2
27	12/7	Interactive proof systems (e.g., for graph nonisomorphism)	§10.4, H
28	12/12	Zero-knowledge proof systems	H
29	12/14	Other cryptographic primitives	§10.6,9.1-2