Honors Theory of Computation, Spring 2002
ANNOUNCEMENTS

• May 14. Solution to Final Exam
  This is now available in the hw directory.
• May 2. Final Exam Date
  Our final exam is Monday May 13, from 2 to 5 in our regular classroom. It is open book, covering everything up till the last lecture.
• April 24. Replacement proof
  The replacement for the crossing sequence argument based on Kolmogorov complexity is now available. Please go to lecture directory. The corresponding question for hw 7 is slightly modified.
• Mar 22. Guest Lecture
  I will be out of town next week. Professor Cole will be our guest lecturer on Wed Mar 27. He will talk about a major result of Hopcroft-Valiant-Paul: DTIME(t) is contained in DSPACE(t/log t), for any t. Using alternating machines, Tompa/Dymond improved this to: DTIME(t) is contained in ATIME(t/log t), for any t. This material is in section 8 of Chapter 7. You can go directly to this section after you read sections 1-4. Please go to reading guide for Chapter 7 for more details.
• Mar 21. Midterm Results
  We are going through our midterm interviews right now. Here is a rough breakdown of grades:

  		Grade Range		Number of Students
  		=========== 		==================
  		20's to 50's		8
  		60's to 80's		7
  		90's to 100's		5
  	

• Feb 28. Midterm Information
  This will be on Wed March 6, in class. It is open book. Everything up to the lecture on March 4 will be covered.
• Feb 27. Solution to Homework
  Solution to HW1 is available. I offer extra credits to the first student who brings to my attention any significant problem with any published solutions. The amount of extra credit is usually no more than the worth of that question.
  A similar offer holds with respect to the lecture notes.
• Jan 30. Peter Shor's talk on ``Quantum Algorithms'' on Mon Feb 4th
  By a majority vote today, the class decided to reschedule our regular class of Feb 4th, so that we can all attend Shor's talk. We also decided to move the regular class to 2:30--3:30. I just verified that our usual classroom (WWH 513) is available for this time.
  Shor's talk is 3:45 to 5:00 in WWH 1302 (refreshments in the lounge before the talk).
  ABSTRACT: Quantum computers are hypothetical devices which use the principles of quantum mechanics to perform computations. For some difficult computational problems, including the cryptographically important problems of prime factorization and finding discrete logarithms, the best algorithms known for classical computers are exponentially slower than the algorithms known for quantum com- puters. Although they ave not yet been built, quantum computers do not appear to violate any fundamental properties of physics. I give a mathematical model of quantum computation, explain how quantum mechanics provides this extra computational power, and briefly describe the algorithm for efficient prime factorization.
• Jan 28. First and last handout
  In case you missed the first class, here is the handout.
• Jan 18. WELCOME TO HONORS THEORY OF COMPUTATION!
  Our first class is Wed Jan 23. Unfortunately, I will be out of town and Professor Dodis will be covering for me. Your first task is to bookmark the class homepage: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yap/classes/theory/ . Your second task is to join the class mailing list by following instructions in the class homepage.