Module overview
Aims and Objectives
Learning Outcomes
Knowledge and Understanding
Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:
- The relationship between the regular, context-free and recursively enumerable classes of languages, and the state-machines that accept them
- The complexity of algorithms and problems, and key complexity classes
- The nature and examples of undecidable problems
- The diagonalisation proof technique
Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills
Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:
- Use polynomial-time reduction to reason about the complexity class of a problem
- Analyse the complexity of a given algorithm or problem
- Ascertain and prove whether or not a given language is regular
- Ascertain and prove whether or not a given language is context-free
- Use the reduction technique to show that a problem is undecidable
Syllabus
Learning and Teaching
Teaching and learning methods
Type | Hours |
---|---|
Preparation for scheduled sessions | 6 |
Tutorial | 12 |
Lecture | 36 |
Follow-up work | 18 |
Revision | 18 |
Wider reading or practice | 50 |
Completion of assessment task | 10 |
Total study time | 150 |
Resources & Reading list
Textbooks
D. Harel (1992). Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing. Addison Wesley.
D. Cohen (1996). Introduction to Computer Theory. Wiley.
N.D. Jones (1999). Computability and Complexity. MIT Press.
D.C. Kozen (1999). Automata and Computability. Springer.
J. Gruska (1996). Foundations of Computing. Thomson.
M. Sipser (1997). Introduction to the Theory of Computation. PWS.
A.K. Dewdney (2001). The (new) Turing Omnibus. Henry Holt.
J. Hein (2002). Discrete Structures, Logic and Computability. Jones and Bartlett.
A.J.G. Hey (1996). Feynman Lectures on Computation. Addison Wesley.
J. Barwise and J. Etchemendy (1993). Turing's World. Stanford.
Assessment
Assessment strategy
This module is assessed by a combination of problem sheets and a final assessment in the form of a written examination.Summative
This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.
Method | Percentage contribution |
---|---|
Examination | 90% |
Problem Sheets | 10% |