computer-science-theory

Do you ever use what you learned in Theory of Computing in your code?

I made what I believe to be a pushdown automaton to read some blob data, but as far as actually using computability IN your code, not just to analyze it. Is there any good application of that? ...

What class of language can Perl regular expressions be used against?

I know that some of the capabilities of the Perl regular expression engine are not regular. However, what class is it? It might be context-free, but CS theory was never my strongest subject. ...

How to argue that if we could solve the halting problem, then we could solve busy beaver?

This is one of the tasks of my assignment. I have a Turing machine simulation which can simulate a busy beaver function. I have done some research about proving this problem, but still don't get it so I guess maybe you can help me here. A good source for me to go to or example of how to argue this would be good. ...

What is missing for this P != NP proof?

I tried to recover a password. When thinking of this I recognized that the problem "password recovery" is a very nice example of a NP problem. If you know the password it's very easy to verify it in polynomial time. BUT if you don't know the password you have to search the whole space of possible solutions which can be shown to take expo...

Which Law of Computer Science is: "Information cannot exist apart from its carrier"?

After reading the page "Laws of Computer Science and Programming" and not finding this law, can anyone tell me what this law is? The point of the law is that the carrier IS the information. In other words, you cannot divide the information on a HDD from the molecular structure of the HDD. You cannot divide the information provided by a ...