Computer Science 370

Fall 2012

Exam 1 Review

(please note:  This is a draft and may be revised during Monday's discussion)

Disclaimer: I have attempted to be comprehensive in the following, but important items may have been omitted by mistake. If you see such an omission, please let me know, but you are responsible for all of the lecture material to date.

The first hour exam for CSci 370 will be held on Friday, September 28, and will cover through section 1.3 of the textbook .  In particular, be prepared to:

• Give proper definitions of the terms encountered so far.
• Be able to work with sets, functions and relations, graphs, and Boolean logic (a truth table may be involved)
• Be able to give a (simple) proof using mathematical induction.
• Be able to give examples of DFA's, NFA's.
• Be able to illustrate how the union, intersection, concatenation, and star operators work on (non-deterministic) finite automata.
• Be able to describe how one converts a NFA to a DFA.
• Be able to construct an NFA from a regular expression, and a regular expression from a DFA.  In these, you will not be asked to construct automata and regular expressions in the manner discussed in the proof of the equivalence of languages described by a regular expression and and languages described by a DFA, but rather to look at expressions / automata and work out what the translation would give you.
• While I will not ask you to prove any of the theorems encountered so far, you should be familiar with the steps taken in those proofs. (added 9/26)