units

FIT2014

Faculty of Information Technology

18 September 2017 20 April 2024

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This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2016 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

Monash University

6 points, SCA Band 2, 0.125 EFTSL

Undergraduate - Unit

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Faculty

Information Technology

Offered

Clayton

  • Second semester 2016 (Day)

Malaysia

  • Second semester 2016 (Day)

Synopsis

This unit gives an introduction to formal languages, basic logic programming, models of computation, and computational complexity. It looks at what computers can and cannot compute. Topics include finite state automata, regular expressions, grammars, computable functions, Turing machines, polynomial-time reductions, and NP-completeness.

Outcomes

At the completion of this unit, students should be able to:

  1. use propositional logic, predicates and quantifiers to represent and analyse problems in the theory of computation;
  2. construct Finite Automata, Nondeterministic Finite Automata, Context-Free Grammars, and Turing Machines to describe languages;
  3. convert Regular Expressions into Finite Automata;
  4. convert Finite Automata into Regular Expressions;
  5. find a Regular Grammar for a Regular Language;
  6. find a parse tree, leftmost derivation and rightmost derivation for a word in a Context Free Language;
  7. know how to show a Context Free Grammar is ambiguous;
  8. use Turing Machines to represent computable functions;
  9. demonstrate the limitations of the models of computation considered;
  10. show a language is not regular, or not context-free, or not recursive;
  11. show a problem is NP-complete.

Assessment

Examination (3 hours): 70%; In-semester assessment: 30%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload equals 12 hours per week comprising:

(a.) Contact hours for on-campus students:

  • Two 1-hour lectures
  • Either one 2-hour tutorial or one 2-hour laboratory (usually alternating weeks)

(b.) Additional requirements (all students):

  • A minimum of 8 hours of independent study per week for reading, working on exercises and assignment(s).

See also Unit timetable information

Chief examiner(s)

Professor Graham Farr

This unit applies to the following area(s) of study

Computer science

Prerequisites

One of FIT1045 or FIT1029 and 6 points of level 1 (or above) mathematics

Prohibitions

CSE2303

Additional information on this unit is available from the faculty at:

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/units/