Lectures

Mon-Wed, 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM, CPH 3604.

Mondays will be devoted to lectures. Wednesdays will be devoted half to lecture, and half to a problem-solving session in small groups after the first week.

Instructor

Jeffrey Shallit
Office: DC 3134
Phone: x34804

Office Hours: Tuesdays, 1-2 PM, or by appointment, or just stop by when my office door is open. If my office door is closed, I'm either not in or busy, so please don't knock.

In addition, every Sunday before an assignment is due, I will hold "virtual office hours" from 7 to 8 PM via AOL Instant Messenger (www.aim.com). My userid there is "CS462Prof".

Teaching assistant

Taylor J. Smith

Office: DC 3117.
Office Hours: Thursdays, 2-3 PM.

Prerequisite

CS 360 or CS 365 or equivalent.

Description

Models of computation such as the Turing machine and the random access machine (RAM) are so powerful that it is quite difficult to prove explicit theorems about what they can and cannot compute.

In the late fifties and early sixties, mathematicians and computer scientists began to study simpler models of computation such as the finite automaton and the pushdown automaton. These models of computation were later found to have many practical applications: regular expressions (used in editing and filename specification); parsing and compiling computer languages; specification (LEX and YACC), etc.

Building on CS 360/365, this course discusses more advanced topics in formal languages and automata theory. Topics that we will discuss include: Thue's problem, the Lyndon theorems, combinatorics on words, closure properties of regular sets, the Myhill-Nerode theorem, ambiguity of CFG's, inherent ambiguity, the Chomsky hierarchy, DCFL's, and other language classes.

We will also cover some "real-life" applications including: phases of compilation, top-down parsing, LL(1) grammars, bottom-up parsing, LR(0) grammars, and LR(k) grammars.

Organization

There will be 11 problem sets, with problems of varying difficulty. These will be worth 50% of the mark. You should expect to spend 4-5 hours a week on these problems.

The assignments will be handed out and due as follows:

Assignment Number        Handed Out                      Due
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1		Monday, January 9	Monday, January 16
2            	Monday, January 16	Monday, January 23
3            	Monday, January 23	Monday, January 30
4            	Monday, January 30 	Monday, February 6
5               Monday, February 6	Monday, February 13
6            	Monday, February 13	Monday, February 27
7            	Monday, February 27	Monday, March 6
8            	Monday, March 6		Monday, March 13
9            	Monday, March 13	Monday, March 20
10		Monday, March 20	Monday, March 27
11		Monday, March 27	Monday, April 3


Hand your assignments in during class. Late policy: no late assignments. Any assignments received after 10 AM on Mondays will receive no credit. Your single lowest mark out of all 11 assignments will be discarded.

There will be no midterm.

There will be a home final exam which is worth 40% of the mark. It will consist of some easy problems and some challenging ones. It may be offered as a take-home final or a traditional final, but in either case, collaboration of any kind is not allowed on the final.

The remaining 10% of the mark will come from the group problem-solving sessions, held on Wednesdays. Each student is expected to present the the solution to at least one problem during the term.

Graduate students will be expected to complete a term project in addition to the other work. For graduate students, the mark breakdown will be: problem sets, 40%; final project, 15%; problem-solving session, 10%, and final exam, 35%. The project involves reading papers from the literature about a topic in formal languages or parsing of your choice, and then writing a short (5-15 pages) report on what you have learned.

There is a list of Open Problems related to the course material. Solve any of them and get an automatic 100 for the course!

For the homework problem sets, you are permitted to discuss general aspects of them with other students in the class, but each person should hand in his/her own copy of the solutions. Plagiarism - using outside sources without documentation - will be dealt with severely. Posting problems on Internet bulletin boards, Facebook, chat groups, newsgroups, etc. and requesting hints or solutions is not permitted.

Any use of outside sources (people, books, articles, etc.) must be documented in anything you hand in for this course. You are welcome to use outside sources, but remember that the goal is to learn: you should try to solve the problems on your own first. When in doubt about whether you need to cite something, err on the side of caution.

Keeping in Touch.

We'll be using Piazza to distribute information and allow discussion, and to issue corrections and clarifications to homework assignments and the take-home final. Please do {\it not\/} post requests for hints, or questions that give away too much about the solution to problems.

Course marks will be available on LEARN.

The course web page has copies of problem sets, hints for getting better marks, errata for the course textbook, cheating policy, and summaries for every lecture.

http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs462

Course Textbook

There is one required text for the course:

• Jeffrey Shallit, A Second Course in Formal Languages and Automata Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2009. The book will be available at the University bookstore, and there's a copy on reserve here: QA267.3.S53 2009 at the Davis Centre Library.

I hear from the bookstore that the book is delayed, but should arrive by the end of the first week of classes.

There's a little more about the book, including errata, here.