Automata and Formal Languages 2020/21

News | Dates | Grading | Content | Exercises | Exam | Material

There are now videos of the material you must refresh before the course here.

Lecture notes

• The lecture notes can be found here. Note that some pages use color!
  
  The lecture notes have already been revised several times, but they 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.
  
  Added on October 23, 2020: Due to the pandemic, this term it is particularly important that you have material to work from home. For this reason I have decided to put online a version of the lecture notes containing solutions to the exercises, even though in later chapters the solutions are often only sketched and have not been yet revised. Please be aware that these solutions are bound to contain typos, notation inconsistencies, and minor mistakes. I will be grateful for any pointers to mistakes, but I may not have time to correct them before the end of the course.
  
  The version with solutions has replaced the previous one at the link above.
  
  
• Here you can find an online collection of examples. It is seriously outdated, it was written for an old version of the lecture notes.

Literature

• My slides for the course Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science (in German), with the material on Automata Theory of which we assume knowledge (NFAs, DFAs, regular expressions, conversion algorithms, closure under boolean operations, pumping lemma, minimal DFAs).
• 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.

Slides

0. Introduction
1. Automata as data structures
2. Automata classes and conversions
3. Minimization
4. Implementing operations on sets
5. Implementing operations on relations
6. Pattern matching
7. Fixed-length languages
8. Verification
9. Monadic second-order logic on words
10. Presburger Arithmetic
11. Omega-automata
12. Implementing boolean operations
13. Emptiness checking
14. 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.
• JFLAP Game. A game for practicing automata, regular expression and temporal logic interconvertions.
• Owl. A Java tool collection and library for Omega-words, ω-automata and Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). Batteries included.
• Automata Tutor. An online tool in which to practice exercises with automata and get feedback.
• SPOT. An online tool for ω-automata and Linear Temporal Logic (LTL).