Introduction
CS 510 Section 1 is offered at 8:55am to 10:10am, on Tuesday and Thursday,
in Room 118B. The final examination will take place ON THURSDAY DECEMBER 10th,
2009 at 8am.
Curricular function
CS 510 is a fundamental course for any graduate student in Computer Science.
Its prerequisites include a passing grade (C or better) in CS 370 (Compilers)
and CS 372 (Data Structures and Algorithms). These pre-requisites are essential
-- the lack of such pre-requisites is likely to prevent a student from
successfully completing the coursework. Any students who do not meet these
requirements are strongly encouraged to contact the instructor, and they should
probably consider satisfying such deficiencies before enrolling in CS 510.
CS 510 is a core course for the Master degree in Computer Science and it is
one of the compulsory areas in the Qualifying Examination.
Educational function
Theory of Computing is a branch of computer science aimed at
investigating the theoretical foundations of the notion of
computability. CS 510 is a course that will introduce some of the
fundamental ideas in this branch of computer science. Some of these ideas
include
- Understanding that we can model a computer as mathematical object -- thus
allowing us to use the tools of mathematics to reason about the
capabilities of different ``types of computers''.
- A formal language is a set of string and it can be used to model a
computation problem. It is possible to identify different classes of
``Languages'', where each class imposes different requirements on the power
of the computer used.
- Formal Languages can be described in many different ways, and they all
can be proved to be equivalent.
- The Church's Thesis: there exists a model of computing that can compute
everything that is computable...
- There are problems that can be proved to be not computable
These web pages
These pages work best when viewed with a browser that supports frames and
tables. To navigate forwards and backwards through frames, hold the
right mouse button down (Unix, Wintel) or hold the one mouse
button down for a short time (Mac) in the appropriate frame. Page-up,
page-down, and printing a frame all work on the selected frame. Click on
menu items on the left frame for specific course information.
NOTE: these web pages and the material
accessible from them is meant exclusively for the internal use by the NMSU
students registered for the CS-510 course. Any other use of this material
without explicit permission is forbidden.
If you experience any difficulties with these pages, find errors in them, or
have any suggestions to improve them, please let Enrico Pontelli know. Send him
E-mail at epontell@cs.nmsu.edu.
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