Exam Advice + Help

Hello Everyone

I am busy working my way through the textbook and have the following questions:

1) Do we not recieve a past paper? - I am not sure what to expect in the exam?

2) I do not have solutions to assignment 3, could someone email me them please.

3) This is my first time doing honours courses which works very differently to undergrad courses from my experience and thus any advice or suggestions on study methods would be much appretiated.

Lior

Hi

no past papers
no assignment 3 results/solutions
as for study methods... its basically the same as undergrad things -nothign really changes. I think they may just ask more "in-depth" questions i nthe exams. But seeing as this subject is hectic enough, I guess the questions will be similar to the assignments. I am really struggling to get this subjects stuff into my head

Do you think we would for instance have to be able to reproduce the proof of Th 3.2 (the step counter thingie). I can (kind of) talk my way through it but it really is a but much to write up under exam conditions!

I'm worried that such a level of detail may be required & then i'm not going to make it.

Lior, i've not done any UNISA undergrad stuff but i've found that our exams are quite similar to the assignments. If you're comfortable answering assignment type questions my guess is you're ok for the exams.

did we have to reproduce proofs in the assignments? I am on chpt 2 of this subject - so nowhere near chpt 3 and I can't recall what was asked i nthe assignments. I think its a bit daft to ask us to parrot fashion recite a proof.

does anyone think we may get a list of "equations" in the exam?

I don't mean to swamp you with even more reading but, I found this site

http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~stone/courses/automata/spring-2001/

with some notes (in postscript at the bottom of the page). They use the same text we use and the lecturer has posted notes on various sections.

could you open any of the stuff?

Yes, I downloaded all notes discussing the first four chapters. You do need a Postscript (.ps files) viewer though. I used the ghostscript viewer. It is free. I tried to open a few docs off the site just now and they worked fine so I think the link still works. What kind of errors are you getting?

I can't open the files - I was trying adobe... where can I downlaod shostscript?

Try these sites for Ghostscript:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1897&package_id=108733

or

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

This viewer was also available on the CD's that UNISA used to hand out to Computer Science students doing the programming modules such as COS311, COS211, COS212 etc.