Computer Science 370
Fall 2012
Exam 3 Review
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 third hour exam for CSci 370 will be held on Friday, November 16, and
will cover from section 2.2 through section 2.3 (skipping section 2.4) and
chapter 3 of the textbook. In particular, be prepared
to:
- Give proper (formal) definitions of the terms encountered so far.
- Be able to answer some simple questions about generating a context-free
grammar from a push-down automata.
- Be able to state and use the pumping lemma for context-free grammars.
- Be able to describe the Chomsky Hierarchy as we have seen it so far (we
get to see it again in the week of this exam).
- Be able to give a formal definition of a Turing Machine and of
configurations. Be able to say formally what it means for a Turing
Machine to accept an input.
- Be able to give an informal (diagrammatic and/or words) description of
a Turing Machine, and demonstrate how an input string is processed (by using
configurations).
- Be able to discuss some of the variants of Turing Machines and to argue
informally why they are equally powerful when compared to our working
definition of a TM.
- Be able to say what it means for a language to be computable.
What it means for a language to be decidable.