18.404/6.5400 (formerly 6.840) Fall 2022
Introduction to the Theory of Computation

Required background. To succeed in this class, you need experience and skill with mathematical concepts, theorems, and proofs. If you did reasonably well in 18.062, 18.200, or any other substantial, proof-oriented mathematics class, you should be fine. The class moves quickly, covering about 90% of the textbook. The homework assignments generally require proving some statement, and creativity in finding proofs will be necessary.

Resources

Information, Problem Sets, and Study Materials

** Access requires MIT certificates.

Homework submission instructions. Upload a single file with all problems to Gradescope before the due date. Handwritten is ok as long as we can read it easily, otherwise use latex. When Gradescope prompts you, mark the pages containing each problem. If you upload several files, the last upload overrides all previous uploads, so do not upload individual problems separately.

Late homework submission. You may submit any individual problems after the due date, before 11:59pm the following day, for a 1 point per problem late penalty deduction. In each pset, you may submit some problems or problem parts on time and others late. (Note the change in policy, now allowing late problem parts. The penalty will be 10% of the part's point value.) At 2:30pm on the due date, the regular Gradescope assignment will close and a new "late submission" assignment will appear. Please upload only those problems you wish to be counted as late. You may resubmit problems you submitted previously if you wish to change your answer, but these will be marked late and get the 1 point penalty. DO NOT RESUBMIT UNCHANGED PROBLEMS you submitted previously. The late submissions will override earlier submissions. Note: We cannot accept unexcused (see "Student Support" below) homework after the late submission deadline.

Regrade requests. If you feel that your work was incorrectly graded, you may submit a regrade request through gradescope. Please review your graded papers promptly; regrade requests are accepted only for two weeks from the original pset due date. Please do not abuse the regrade system by making lots of frivolous requests; we have limited grader capacity.

Course Staff

Office Hours

Lectures and Recitation Sections

Lectures are held in room 34-101 on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:30 to 4pm.
The one-hour recitations meet Fridays at the following times and rooms:

Recitation Notes

  1. September 9 - Jett's notes
  2. September 16 - Jocelin's notes
  3. September 23 - Jocelin's notes
  4. September 30 - Jason's notes
  5. October 7 - Lara's notes
  6. October 14 - Jett's notes
  7. October 21 - Jason's notes
  8. October 28 - MingYang's notes

Exam Schedule

Midterm exam: Thursday, October 27, 2:30 - 4pm, Walker (Building 50), top floor.
Final exam: Tuesday, December 20, 1:30 - 4:30, Johnson Track.

Student Support

If you are dealing with a personal or medical issue that may affect your participation in any MIT class, please discuss it with Student Support Services (S3) at 617-253-4861. They have a Dean on Call 24x7 at 617-253-1212. Graduate students may contact GradSupport. We cannot excuse you from coursework without support from S3 or GradSupport.

If you may require disability accommodations, please speak early in the semester with Associate Dean Kathleen Monagle then let me know so that we can work together to get your accommodation logistics in place.

Course Schedule

  1. 9/8  Introduction, finite automata, regular expressions §1.1
  2. 9/13  Nondeterminism, closure properties, Reg Exprs → FA §1.2-1.3
  3. 9/15  Reg Exprs ← FA, Proving non-regularity via pumping lemma, CFGs §1.4-2.1
  4. 9/20  Context free languages, Pushdown Automata, CFG ⇆ PDA §2.2
  5. 9/22  Context-free pumping lemma, Turing machines §2.3,3.1 Pset 1 DUE
  6. 9/27  TM variants, Church-Turing thesis §3.2-3.3
  7. 9/29  Decision problems for automata and grammars §4.1
  8. 10/4  Undecidability §4.2
  9. 10/6  Reducibility §5.1,5.3 Pset 2 DUE
    10/11  NO CLASS --- Student Holiday
  10. 10/13  Computation history method §5.2
  11. 10/18  Recursion theorem, Logic §6.1-6.2
  12. 10/20  Time complexity §7.1 Pset 3 DUE
  13. 10/25  P and NP, SAT, Poly-time reducibility §7.2-7.3
  14. 10/27  Midterm Exam
  15. 11/1  NP-completeness §7.5
  16. 11/3  Cook-Levin theorem §7.4
  17. 11/8  Space complexity, PSPACE §8.1-8.2
  18. 11/10  Savitch's theorem, PSPACE-completeness §8.3 Pset 4 DUE
  19. 11/15  Games, Generalized geography, L and NL §8.3-8.4
  20. 11/17  NL-completeness, NL = coNL §8.4
  21. 11/22  Hierarchy theorems §9.1
    11/24  NO CLASS --- Thanksgiving
  22. 11/29  Provably intractable problems, oracles §9.2 Pset 5 DUE
  23. 12/1  Probabilistic computation, BPP §10.2
  24. 12/6  An interesting language in BPP, Arithmetization §10.2
  25. 12/8  Interactive proof systems, IP §10.4 Pset 6 DUE
  26. 12/13  coNP ⊆ IP §10.4

2020 Lectures

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