Computer Science 456/656
Automata and Formal Languages

CSC 456/656 Study Guide for Second Midterm Examination Fall 2003

1. There will be true/false questions. Some of these may be on the exam.
2. There may be a question involving regular expressions.
3. There will be some definitions and fill-in-the-blank questions.
4. There will be a question involving constructing a CF grammar for a language.
5. There will be a question requiring the use of the pumping lemma for context-free languages to prove that some particular language is not context-free.
6. I expect you to know what the Church Turing thesis is, and why it's important.
7. I expect you to be able to draw the state diagram for a Turing machine that does something very simple, such as right-shifting or left-shifting a string.
8. There will be no proofs of decidability, but the issue will come up in the true-false portion.
9. The test is very easy. You should be through in ten minutes, fifteen at the most.