The Theory of Computation Kun-Mao Chao (趙坤茂) National Taiwan University http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~kmchao/

About this course Course: The Theory of Computation (限在職專班生選修; This evening class is for part-time students of 在職專班 only.) Fall semester, 2012 18:30 - 21:15 Tuesday, R439 CSIE Building. 3 credits Web site: http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~kmchao/theory12fall Instructor: Kun-Mao Chao (趙坤茂) Teaching assistant: Chia-Jung Chang (張家榮)

Topics Sets, Relations, Languages Finite Automata Context-free Languages Turing Machines Undecidability Computational Complexity NP-completeness Related Topics

Grading policy Homework assignments and Class participation (15%) Two midterm exams (70%; 35% each): Midterm #1: Oct. 30, 2012 (tentative) Midterm #2: Dec. 11, 2012 (tentative) Oral presentation of selected papers/topics (15%)

Textbook Elements of the Theory of Computation, Second Edition by Harry R. Lewis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, Prentice-Hall, 1998.

ISAAC 2012 The 23rd International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2012) will be held at NTU on Dec. 19-21. Please attend the reception in the evening of Dec. 18.

Top ten reasons for taking this class 10. You may bring your dinner to the class as long as it is not stinky and you clean up your table afterwards. 9. A good mental exercise. 8. To learn more about theoretical computer science. 7. To sharpen your skills in proving theorems. 6. To learn more about computation.

Top ten reasons for taking this class 5. To improve your programming ability. 4. To participate in an international event. 3. To figure out your potential that you never knew. 2. To get inspired. 1. You tell me!

Tonight’s outlook Let’s go for a walk – a nice way to have insight into challenging problems. In tonight’s walk, we discussed the question “How many ways can one partition a set of n elements?” Here is the answer. (Bell number) Here is a note that I wrote next morning.