Dr. Gabriel Robins Professor of Computer Science Department of Computer Science School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Virginia 85 Engineer's Way, P.O. Box 400740 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4740, USA robins@cs.virginia.edu www.cs.virginia.edu/robins Phone: (434) 982-2207 Office: 406 Rice Hall Gabe's vitae / resume (NIH Biosketch)

CS6160 - Theory of Computation, UVa

• Prof contact information and office hours

• Syllabus

• Office hours: right after each class meeting; also by appointment, or at any time that I'm in my office. Q&A will also be conducted by Email and posted on the course blog continuously.

• Emails to the class (posted here for completeness):
  • Welcome to Theory of Computation

• Questionnaire

• Basic concepts and definitions

• Lecture Slides:
  • Historical perspectives (part 1): Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, and Eratosthenes (and PDF)
  • Historical perspectives (part 2): al-Hasan, Fibonacci, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, Euler, Gauss, and Hamilton (and PDF)
  • Historical perspectives (part 3): Boole, De Morgan, Babbage, Lovelace, Carroll, Venn, Cantor, and Russell (and PDF)
  • Historical perspectives (part 4): Hardy, Ramanujan, Ramsey, and Hilbert (and PDF)
  • Historical perspectives (part 5): Godel, Church, and Turing (and PDF)
  • Historical perspectives (part 6): von Neumann, Shannon, Kleene, and Chomsky (and PDF)
  • Formal languages, automata models, grammars, decidability, and Rice's theorem (and PDF)
  • Computational universality and the Church-Turing thesis (and PDF)
  • More fractal-based algorithmic art (and PDF)
  • Resource-bounded computation, complexity classes, gap theorems, alternation, the polynomial hierarchy, probabilistic TM's, and the complexity zoo (and PDF)
  • The Turing test, robotics, and the technological singularity (and PDF)
  • NP completeness, approximation algorithms, and zero-knowledge proofs (and PDF)
  • Concepts, ideas, and techniques (and PDF)

• Problem sets:
  • Problem set 1
  • Problem set 2
    
  • Problem set 3
    

• Sample Term project
  (You are encouraged to come up with your own project idea, subject to my approval;
  all projects must be demoed and turned in before the final exam date.)

• Course evaluation (and plain text version)

• Q and A: PLEASE READ THIS OFTEN!

• Good supplemental readings:

• Good puzzles and games Web stores: