CS 3350 Automata, Computability, and Formal Languages
Fall 2016, Final Exam

Name: __________________________________________________________

General comments:

Good luck!

1. Finite automata and regular languages:

1a. Design a finite automaton for recognizing binary sequences that end with 1. Assume that the input strings contain only symbols 0 and 1. The easiest is to have 3 states: start, accept, and reject, you just need to describe transitions between these states. Show, step-by-step, how your automaton will accept the string 01101.

1b. On the example of this automaton, show how the word 01101 can be represented as xyz in accordance with the pumping lemma.

1c. Use a general algorithm to describe a regular expression corresponding to the finite automaton from the Problem 1a.

1d-e. Binary strings ending with 1 can also be described by a regular expression (0 U 1)*1. Use a general algorithm to transform this regular expression into a finite automaton: first a non-deterministic one, then a deterministic one.

2. Beyond finite automata: pushdown automata and context-free grammars:

2a. Prove that the language consisting of all expressions that contain half as many a's as b's is not regular.

2b. Use a general algorithm to transform the finite automaton from the Problem 1a into a context-free grammar (CFG). Show, step-by-step, how this CFG will generate the word 01101.

2c. For the context-free grammar from the Problem 2b, show how the word 01101 can be represented as uvxyz in accordance with the pumping lemma.

2d. Use a general algorithm to translate the CFG from 2b into Chomsky normal form.

2e. Use a general algorithm to translate the CFG from 2b into an appropriate push-down automaton. Explain, step-by-step, how this automaton will accept the word 01101.

2f. Use the general stack-based algorithms to show:

  • how the compiler will transform the expression 2 − 3 * (1 + 2) into inverse Polish notation, and
  • how it will compute the value of this expression.

3. Beyond pushdown automata: Turing machines

3a. Prove that there exists a language that is not context-free and therefore, cannot be recognized by a pushdown automaton. You can use the same language we had in class or -- for extra credit -- some other language.

3b-c. Use a general algorithm to design a Turing machine that accepts exactly all sequences accepted by a finite automaton from Problem 1a. Show, step-by-step, how this Turing machine will accept the word 01101. Describe, for each step, how the state of the tape can be represented in terms of states of two stacks.

3d. Design a Turing machine for computing 4 * n in binary code. Trace it for the binary number n = 102 (which is 2 decimal); the result of the computation should 4 * 2 = 810, i.e., 10002.

4. Beyond Turing machines: computability

4a. Formulate Church-Turing thesis. Is it a mathematical theorem? Is it a statement about the physical world?

4b. Prove that the halting problem is not algorithmically solvable.

4c. In the proof that the halting problem is not algorithmically solvable, we use a diagonal function
f(n) which was defined as follows:

  • f(n) = jn(n) + 1 if n is a valid code of a Java program and jn halts on n;
  • f(n) = 0 otherwise.
Write down the first 3 values f(0), f(1), and f(2) of the diagonal function f(n) for the following case:
  • j0(n) = 2 * n;
  • 1 is not a valid numerical code of a program; and
  • j2(n) = n + 4.

4d. Not all algorithms are feasible, but, unfortunately, we do not have a perfect definition is feasibility. Give two examples:

  • an example of an algorithm which is feasible according to the current definition but not practically feasible, and
  • an example of an algorithm which is practically feasible but not feasible according to the current definition.

4e. Briefly describe what is P, what is NP, and what is NP-hard.