Related papers: Visualizing Why Nondeterministic Finite-State Auto…
In Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses, students find understanding nondeterministic finite-state and pushdown automata difficult. In many cases, this means that it is challenging for them to comprehend the operational semantics of…
The transformation of a nondeterministic finite-state automaton into a deterministic finite-state automaton is an integral part of any course on formal languages and automata theory. For some students, understanding this transformation is…
Most Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses explore the duality between computation models to recognize words in a language and computation models to generate words in a language. For students unaccustomed to formal statements, these…
This article presents a visualization tool for designing and debugging deterministic finite-state machines in FSM -- a domain specific language for the automata theory classroom. Like other automata visualization tools, users can edit…
An introductory formal languages course exposes advanced undergraduate and early graduate students to automata theory, grammars, constructive proofs, computability, and decidability. Programming students find these topics to be challenging…
Deterministic and nondeterministic finite automata (DFAs and NFAs) are abstract models of computation commonly taught in introductory computing theory courses. These models have important applications (such as fast regular expression…
In automata theory, while determinisation provides a standard route to solving many common problems in automata theory, some weak forms of nondeterminism can be dealt with in some problems without costly determinisation. For example, the…
We are motivated by the following question: which data languages admit an active learning algorithm? This question was left open in previous work by the authors, and is particularly challenging for languages recognised by nondeterministic…
Finite automata (FA) are a fundamental computational abstraction that is widely used in practice for various tasks in computer science, linguistics, biology, electrical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Given an input word, an FA…
Deterministic and nondeterministic finite automata with translucent letters were introduced by Nagy and Otto more than a decade ago as Cooperative Distributed systems of a kind of stateless restarting automata with window size one. These…
Regular expressions in an Automata Theory and Formal Languages course are mostly treated as a theoretical topic. That is, to some degree their mathematical properties and their role to describe languages is discussed. This approach fails to…
Many Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses introduce students to Turing machine extensions. One of the most widely-used extensions endows Turing machines with multiple tapes. Although multitape Turing machines are an abstraction to…
A process algebra is proposed, whose semantics maps a term to a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA, for short). We prove a representability theorem: for each NFA $N$, there exists a process algebraic term $p$ such that its semantics is…
Fuzzy automata have long been accepted as a generalization of nondeterministic finite automata. A closer examination, however, shows that the fundamental property---nondeterminism---in nondeterministic finite automata has not been well…
History-deterministic automata are those in which nondeterministic choices can be correctly resolved stepwise: there is a strategy to select a continuation of a run given the next input letter so that if the overall input word admits some…
We study a class of filters -- discrete finite-state transition systems employed as incremental stream transducers -- that have application to robotics: e.g., to model combinatorial estimators and also as concise encodings of feedback…
We explore language semantics for automata combining probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. We first show that there are precisely two natural semantics for probabilistic automata with nondeterminism. For both choices, we show that…
In this paper we consider the class of lambda-nondeterministic linear automata as a model of the class of linear languages. As usual in other automata models, lambda-moves do not increase the acceptance power. The main contribution of this…
Non-deterministic Finite Automata (NFA) represent regular languages concisely, increasing their appeal for applications such as word recognition. This paper proposes a new approach to generate NFA from an interaction language such as UML…
An automaton is history-deterministic if its nondeterminism can be resolved on the fly, only using the prefix of the word read so far. This mild form of nondeterminism has attracted particular attention for its applications in synthesis…