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This book explores some of the more important terminologies and questions concerning programs, computers, problems, and computation. The exploration reduces in many cases to a study of mathematical theories, such as those of automata and formal languages; theories that are interesting also in their own right. These theories provide abstract models that are easier to explore, because their formalisms avoid irrelevant details.
Organized into seven chapters, the material in this book gradually increases in complexity. In many cases, new topics are treated as refinements of old ones, and their study is motivated through their association to programs.
- Chapter 1 is concerned with the definition of some basic concepts.
- Chapter 2 studies finite-memory programs.
- Chapter 3 considers the introduction of recursion to finite-memory programs.
- Chapter 4 deals with the general class of programs.
- Chapter 5 considers the role of time and space in computations.
- Chapter 6 introduces instructions that allow random choices in programs.
- Chapter 7 is devoted to parallelism.Added by clownfish on 2007-01-21 23:38:04
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