By Patrix Rembang 5 months ago Completed

I took this course when it premiered. While Prof. Ullman is a brilliant man, the length of the video (30+ minutes), and maybe my lack of math maturity made me hard to follow the lectures. He most of the time just reads what's on the slide. It would be better if he write on the slides, like Andrew Ng did in Machine Learning or Jennifer Widom did in Intro to Databases, or like Salman Khan.

The good parts are Prof. Ullman and his assistant would answer questions on the forum. The office hours also help.

The quizzes and exam are quite difficult for me. The optional problems are difficult too. You should have experience with formal proof, because the course video is structured as a theorem-proof sequence. You should also read the book, because it provides more context and intuition than the videos.

By Sai from Tokyo 5 months ago Completed

I took this course because I wanted to see this legendary figure in computer science live. The course material is pretty much a standard one. If you download the power point, you realize that Prof. Ullman is simply reading the speaker note but nonetheless I appreciated his lectures. The contents get more and more abstract as we move from finite state automata through pushdown automata to Turing machines but Prof. Ullman tried his best to answer students' questions by providing supplementary "Problem Session" videos, which was very nice. My only complaint is about the ugly Python code given in the 2 programming assignments that was hard to read.

By Bharat Krishna from Seattle, Washington 6 months ago Completed (Partially)

A very good course from the best person on this topic. Exercises were challenging. Course felt a bit rushed towards the end. Automata is a topic which could span beyond 6 weeks. Could have gone more in depth.

Weekly office hours video addressed popular questions on the forums.

Only issue I had was that some videos were long(about 40 mins). Breaking them up into chunks of 10-15 mins would have been better.