Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science

Every Friday we will release an exercise sheet. You have time until the next Friday at 8:00 to submit your solution via (this) CMS. The solutions are submitted as separate PDF-files for each exercise, either digitally created, for example with LaTeX, Typst or LibreOffice, or as a high quality scan (not photos) of a handwritten submission. Each group must write their own solution and must not copy the solution of another group!

You can work in groups of up to 4 students on the exercises. You need to register your permanent groups until October 21st, 16:00, in CMS. Your group size determines which exercises you have to submit:

• Each exercise (or sometimes subexercise) is marked as being for some number of students, between 1 and 4.
• If an exercise is marked as being for x students, then all groups of size >= x have to submit this exercise.
• You may optionally also submit the other exercises to obtain feedback (pending availability of our tutors), however you will not gain any points towards admission for the exams.
• All exercises, even the ones you did not have to submit will be relevant for the exam or even future exercises!

The first exercise sheet is due October 23rd, 8:00, the submission will open on October 21st, 16:00.

While the exercise sheets themselves will be in English, you are free to choose both German or English as the language for your submissions.

For questions about the grading of your exercise sheets, please come to the Office Hours.

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Plagiarism Policy

...aka: what about ChatGPT & co.?

First of all, we need to differentiate between

1. Using ChatGPT to study and understand the concepts and
2. Using ChatGPT to solve the exercises given to you

Case 1 is obviously allowed and does not require any special indication. It is a perfectly valid way to learn, not much different from doing regular research on the internet. Therefore, in what follows, we will mainly concern ourselves with case 2.

Case 2 means that you have used an external source for a (parts of a) solution. You should clearly indicate what source you used for what part of the solution on the same submission (same PDF file) as the task.

If you do not state your source, it will count as plagiarism.

If you state your source, it will not be plagiarism. We will grade the solution, but upon the first (no matter how small) mistake we will stop the grading and award that particular exercise 0 points. We will also not put in extra effort to give detailed feedback (why would we be giving feedback to ChatGPT?)

Note that while we were mostly mentioning ChatGPT, the same holds for other external sources as well.

In addition:

• Any materials from this year's iteration of the lecture can be used and using them is never counted as plagiarism.
• Copying any part of a solution of another group always counts as plagiarism.

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Tutorials

The tutorials are in person on Mondays and will start October 19th. We are offering tutorials in both English and German. You have to register for your tutorials with your preferred tutorial language until October 16th, 23:59, on this website.

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Office Hours

Twice a week, always in room E1.7, room 0.01: