6.045/18.400  Automata, Comput, & Complexity

[6.045's Piazzza discussion site]

[Alan Turing's 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers"]

[Alan Turing's 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"]

[6.045 course evaluation]

This course provides a challenging introduction to some of the central ideas of theoretical computer science.  Beginning in antiquity, the course will progress through finite automata, circuits and decision trees, Turing machines and computability, efficient algorithms and reducibility, the P versus NP problem, NP-completeness, the power of randomness, cryptography and one-way functions, computational learning theory, and quantum computing.  It examines the classes of problems that can and cannot be solved by various kinds of machines.  It tries to explain the key differences between computational models that affect their power.

Prerequisites: We assume that you have taken 6.042 Mathematics for Computer Science, or have equivalent mathematical preparation.  In particular, we will assume you have basic "mathematical maturity": i.e., that you're comfortable both reading and writing rigorous mathematical proofs.