Answering questions on the course contents via email is typically
rather time-consuming; therefore, such kinds of questions will be answered
only if the following two conditions are satisfied:
- The answer to the question is relatively short.
E.g., the request "Please send me back a Turing Machine that solves the
following problem <50 page problem specification follows>" will
not be answered.
- The answer can be determined in a relatively short amount of
time.
E.g., the question: "Does the given Turing Machine correctly
solve the following problem? <50 page problem specification and
listing of transitions of 2000 state TM follow>" will not be
answered.
Please notice that condition 1 above does not necessarily imply condition
2. E.g., the answer to the question "Is P = NP?" could be typed using
either 2 or 3 characters; nevertheless, hundreds of mathematicians,
logicians, and computer scientists have not been able to provide such an
answer despite several decades of efforts.
Also, although this might seem to contradict well-known results in
computational complexity, item 2 does not necessarily imply item 1. The
reason is that the answer to a question might just follow immediately from
standard results or techniques, but nevertheless might require a lengthy
explanation to be useful to a student. In all such cases, a chat during
office hours is much more efficient and convenient, both for the student
and for myself.
All questions that do not satisfy conditions 1 and 2 have to be asked
either during office hours, or after the lectures.
Note that the
request: "Does the given Turing Machine correctly solve the following
problem? <50 page problem specification and listing of transitions of
2000 state TM follows>" will not be answered in any case :-).
home page of Diego Calvanese.