Policies

What to expect:

This class is going to be hard. There is no way around it. There will be a lot of material. A lot of it is difficult material. It will stretch your brain.

The class will be organized and regularly scheduled. I will do everything I can to arrange it so the total time required is kept reasonable and consistent. Ideally, you will be able to put your outside-of-class work (reading and homework) as a weekly calendar item, just like the lectures.

The Book:

The textbook for this course is Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser. It does not matter if you use the first, second, or third edition. We will follow the book pretty closely. This is supposed to help you. If you don't understand something, you can be confident that you can find it in the book. You should still ask a question if you have one during the lecture.

Homework:

Late homework will not be accepted. Except for the week of spring break and the week after spring break, there will be a homework handed out every Tuesday. Each homework will cover the topics from the two lecture for that week and will be due one week after it has been handed out (i.e., the following Tuesday at the beginning class). If you will not be in class on a day that the homework is due, it may be submitted by email to me (Don) at least one hour before the start of class.

You can handwrite your solutions but they need to look neat. Typed solutions are encouraged, preferably typeset with LaTeX. If they are sloppily written, hard to read, crumpled up, etc., you will get one warning. If it happens again, you enter the homework doghouse. If you are in the homework doghouse, your work will only accepted if it is typed. For typed homework, drawing figures by hand is okay.

There will be $12$ homework assignments. One assignemnt will count half and one assignment will count double so it's effectively $12.5$ homeworks.

Collaboration:

Collaboration on homeworks is allowed, but assignments must be written up individually. Collaboration means discussing problems with your classmats. Your write-up must be done alone. Do not copy down a solution that you don't understand. This is called cheating and its a serious mistake with serious consequences. If you obtain any part of your solutions with the help of others or other sources, you must identify the sources/people on your submitted homework.

Grading:

The homeworks will combine for $50$ percent of your grade.
The midterm will count $20$ percent.
The final will count $30$ percent.

HuskyCT:

I will be using HuskyCT to distribute announcements, homework solutions, and grades. All other relevant course info and material will be posted to this course website.