Stanford University - Automata (2012)

Stanford University - Automata (2012) English | H264 | 960x540 | 15fps 160kbps | AAC 128kbps 44.1KHz | 391MB Genre: eLearning

Each week you will have about 2 hours of video to watch, and either one or two groups of homework questions. The time taken by the videos is about half the time I took to deliver the same material in class. The reason the video goes faster than in-class presentation is that a lot of the "ums" and fumbling are edited out. The speed can be good, if the material is not dense or hard to follow. However, there will undoubtedly be points where the going is rough -- details of a proof or an algorithm. In those cases, I encourage you to take advantage of the fact that the lectures are on video, to repeat material, or pause it to stare at a slide for example. In the first week's videos, you will begin with an introduction to the whole course. I want to try to convince you of the value of learning the four big concepts that you can take away from this course: finite automata, context-free grammars, undecidable problems, and intractable problems (NP-completeness). The second video is an informal introduction to finite automata. Both these two first videos are "light," and I expect you to have little trouble. The third video introduces deterministic finite automata, and at this point we start to get more formal. In the fourth video, the important concept of nondeterminism is introduced. We learn the remarkable fact that despite the almost "magic" capability of nondeterminism, it does not add power to the finite automaton (although it does make description of many applications of automata a lot easier). More info: _https://www.coursera.org/course/automata