(Speaking as myself and not as any particular hat-wearer: it’s a shame this peer-review precondition was put in place for surveys specifically, but it’s a bigger shame that bad actors required this to be put in place at all.)

Oh, no intent to make a direct comparison! Even for not-yet-peer-reviewed work, I feel one can put greater trust in a TCS survey being human-written vs. one in another area, possibly from some combination of the surveyed work being more technical to engage with, slower pace of publication, etc.

It reflects pretty positively on the state of TCS versus other areas that one can read a survey/review in SIGACT News or BEATCS and *not* have to worry whether it’s AI-generated slop!

This is a really fun problem actually. Given two strings x and y, what is the smallest DFA that accepts x but rejects y?

cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Tal...

And hey, if you want to download the book directly from my website, you can do that too: taylorjsmith.xyz/tocopen/

Now, you might ask “but where will you put these books when all your bookshelves are already full?” To that, I reply “don’t worry about it”.

I openly admit to being skeptical of any individual's contribution to some paper with ~5 or more authors, mostly because that's not standard practice in my field. But arbitrary name orderings or more pointless metrics won't allay that skepticism. You know what would? Contribution statements.

Anyway, this is a supremely stupid metric to track citations/measure impact (but, if it's any consolation, one that isn't officially sanctioned by GScholar). I still don't understand why other fields don't just list authors alphabetically and add a contribution statement if they REALLY want to.

And that's all! Thanks for taking this trip back in time and witnessing my undergrad folly.
Two parting observations: I got way better at this theory stuff in 4th year/grad school, and my undergrad students are evidently WAY better at this theory stuff than I was, based on their midterm answers.

5a. Again, generous how I earned 5 marks for a woefully incomplete answer, and one that ties in ambiguity for no reason.
5b. I deserve 0 marks here. But looking back at my notes, I think this question was implicitly asking to convert the CFG to CNF. So why phrase it that way?
5c. Nice parse tree.

4a. This one's funny to me, not only because I tried to claim {a,b,c}* = a^i b^j c^k for some reason, but because I hammer on the mistake of fixing a specific decomposition every single time I teach the PL now.
4b. I mean, I did construct a PDA here, it just assumes all the a's come before the b's.

3a. Incredibly generous how I earned 3 marks for writing a sentence fragment.
3b. I don't even know what I was going for here. I must've vaguely remembered the Myhill–Nerode theorem and just ran with that.
3c. Okay, I made one small mistake here and lost all but one mark. I'm mad about this one.