I suspect that the students attending this course make a bimodal distribution.
You may be someone who needs a lo-stress C course to keep your life under
control, or you may be an enthusiast who really really wants to know
about computability. If you are of the second inclination you might like
to keep an eye on the Part III reading course in Computability and Logic
for which i have some sort of responsibility; look at
my Part III page .
Either way you might like to cast an eye over my
supervision notes for this course (I have been supervising it since
its inception and i have accumulated 50-odd pages of observations.) Read
at you own risk.
You will find very useful Prof Pitts' materials on Languages
and Automata on the computer laboratory's course pages; ditto his
CS 1B materials .
You may find my discussion of the last part of Q10 on his sheet useful: it concerns the question of why the Ackermann function is not primitive recursive even tho' its slices are.
There is a slight mismatch between his materials and Dr Button's in
that our course covers push-down automata and context-free languages
(which CS doesn't—(I think!) and we do not cover lambda calculus
whereas they do. Nevertheless, Prof Pitts' materials come with the
highest possible recommendation. He is sensationally organised and
the materials are beautifully set out.
Here are my Regular Languages
and Finite Automata materials (originally written for Queen Mary)
in pdf format. I am greatly endebted to Chloë Brown for creating
a version in html . This
version is preferable in various ways to the pdf version, since the
answers to the exercises are not immediately visible in the way they
are in the .pdf version, but can be seen only when you click on the
link. Thank you, Chloë Brown!! Here
is a file of answers to the coursework questions at the end .
Some of you have asked me whether Regular languages are good for
anything. These notes of Arthur
Norman's on the hardness of the equality problem for regular
languages may be of interest to strong students.
This discussion answer to Sheet 4
Question 4 Part (i) of Dr Chiodo's 2017 materials might be useful.
Here is a discussion of 2017 paper 4 question 4H.
Here is a discussion of 2017 paper 3 question 11H.
This discussion answer to Sheet 2 Question 1 Part (d) of Dr Chiodo's 2016 materials might be useful.
Here is a discussion of the last part of 2009 paper 6 question 3 of the CS Tripos.
Here is the pdf file of the notes of Richard Crouch's second-year course at
the University of Nottingham on Languages, Computation and Automata. They do not correspond exactly to any course here, but students might find them useful: they are very meaty.
I found this rather nice lambda-calculus reduction workbench. I hope you will find it fun.
Materials for 1b Computer Science.
Materials for 1a Computer Science .
Materials for Part III Mathematics .
Materials for Logic-For-Linguists.
Materials for Part II Mathematics .
Materials for Part IV Mathematics .
Materials for the Computer Science M. Phil .