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Students find their first course in Formal Languages and Automata Theory challenging. In addition to the development of formal arguments, most students struggle to understand nondeterministic computation models. In part, the struggle stems…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We generalize the concept of synchronizing words for finite automata, which map all states of the automata to the same state, to deterministic visibly push-down automata. Here, a synchronizing word w does not only map all states to the same…
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…
Finite State Machines are a concept widely taught in undergraduate theory of computing courses. Educators typically use tools with static representations of FSMs to help students visualize these objects and processes; however, all existing…
Multi-stack machines and Turing machines can simulate to each other. In this note, we give a succinct definition of multi-stack machines, and from this definition it is clearly seen that pushdown automata and deterministic finite automata…
There are many types of automata and grammar models that have been studied in the literature, and for these models, it is common to determine whether certain problems are decidable. One problem that has been difficult to answer throughout…
Visibly pushdown automata are input-driven pushdown automata that recognize some non-regular context-free languages while preserving the nice closure and decidability properties of finite automata. Visibly pushdown automata with multiple…
Finite-state models, such as finite-state machines (FSMs), aid software engineering in many ways. They are often used in formal verification and also can serve as visual software models. The latter application is associated with the…
We study decidability of verification problems for timed automata extended with unbounded discrete data structures. More detailed, we extend timed automata with a pushdown stack. In this way, we obtain a strong model that may for instance…
Affine automata provide a finite-state computational model that preserves the linear-algebraic structure of quantum computation while operating entirely over the reals. Recent work has shown that affine automata can far surpass classical…
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…
The simulation of deterministic pushdown automata defined over a one-letter alphabet by finite state automata is investigated from a descriptional complexity point of view. We show that each unary deterministic pushdown automaton of size s…
There has been a growing interest in defining models of automata enriched with time, such as finite automata extended with clocks (timed automata). In this paper, we study deterministic timed finite state machines (TFSMs), i.e., finite…
Visibly pushdown automata (VPA), introduced by Alur and Madhusuan in 2004, is a subclass of pushdown automata whose stack behavior is completely determined by the input symbol according to a fixed partition of the input alphabet. Since its…
We define a new subclass of nondeterministic finite automata for prefix-closed languages called Flanked Finite Automata (FFA). We show that this class enjoys good complexity properties while preserving the succinctness of nondeterministic…