Teaching circuits as the first computational model
This fall, I am once again teaching Harvard’s “Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science” course (CS 121). Like many “intro to TCS / intro to theory of computation” courses, Harvard’s course used to be taught with Sipser’s classic textbook. Sipser’s book is indeed, for better or worse, a classic. It is extremely well-written and students like it very much. It has clear explanations, plenty of examples and solved exercises, and a wealth of material on the web accumulated through decades of it being used in many courses. On the other hand, CS in general and theoretical CS in particular has changed a lot in the 25+ years since the book was written. In fact, the basic approach of starting with finite automata as the initial model of computation dates to the 1969 book of Hopcroft and Ullman.
One of my main goals in revising the theoretical CS course is to give students both rigorous foundations as well as a taste of modern topics. Some of these modern topics:
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