Here is a guide to the computing theory background expected for students entering this course.
If you’ve completed cs2150 and a good Theory of Computation or Algorithms course (the official pre-requisites for this course) and remember the big ideas from that class, this should all be familiar to you already, but it may still be useful to refresh your understanding using these materials.
If you haven’t taken the prerequisite courses and are getting up to speed on your own, we hope these materials will be helpful. In class, we will briefly review many of these concepts when they are relevant (and, of course, I am happy to answer any questions and appreciate being interrupted if I assume something that is unclear), but will review them expecting students to already have fairly good understanding of these ideas from previous courses.
Part 1: Models of Computation
Part 2: Cost of Computation