Automata and Formal Languages 2015/16

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Lecture notes

• The lecture notes can be found here. Notice that some pages use color! Printed copies can be obtained from the Fachschaft at a very low price, if some student volunteers to organize the process.
  
  The lecture notes have already been revised several times, but it may still contain typos or mistakes. Please email me if you find some. If there is some important error then I will call your attention to it through the News.
  
  
• Here you can find an online collection of examples. It is seriously outdated, it was written for an old version of the script.

Literature

• Tobias Nipkow's slides from his introductory lecture (in German).
• Debasis Mitra's slides from his introductory lecture (in English). Remark: this is just one of the many sets of slides available on line.
• John E. Hopcroft, Rajeev Motwani, Jeffrey D. Ullman;
  Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation;
  Addison-Wesley Longman, 3rd edition, 2006.
• John Martin;
  Introduction to Languages and the Theory of Computation;
  McGraw-Hill, 2002.
• Michael Sipser;
  Introduction to the Theory of Computation;
  Course Technology, 2005.
• Joerg Flum, Erich Graedel, Thomas Wilke (eds.);
  Logic and Automata: History and Perspectives, Volume 2;
  Amsterdam University Press, 2008.
• Dominique Perrin, Jean-Eric Pin;
  Infinite Words: Automata, Semigroups, Logic and Games;
  Academic Press, 2004.

Bonus Material

• Presuburger Arithmetic
• Safra Construction

Slides

Here are some old slides for the course

• Automata classes and conversions
• Minimization
• Implementing operations on sets
• Implementing operations on relations
• Pattern matching
• Fixed-length languages
• Verification
• Monadic Second-order Logic
• Omega-automata
• Implementing boolean operations
• Emptiness checking
• Verification of liveness properties

Tools

In both exercises and class we will demonstrate and use a number of tools to illustrate the theory and to present typical applications. They may include:

• JFLAP. Automata on finite words
• SPIN. Verification using automata on infinite words
• MONA. Logic and automata connection.
• LTL2BA. Automata and temporal logic.
• GOAL. Büchi Automata and temporal logic, interactive graphical tool
• JFLAP Game. A game for practicing automata, regular expression and temporal logic interconvertions.