Re[2]: Techniques for variable field types in a subfile

["Eric N. Wilson" <doulos1@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello david.vann,

Friday, August 11, 2000, 12:59:30 AM, you wrote:

> What's a finite state machine?

> Cheers  -  Ignoramus

First of all the only dumb question is the question that is not asked.
Some people on this list may be rude and shoot people down but that is
not the case with everyone. A finite state machine is a computer
science term for which the below definition may help. There are a
great many books that talk about these and I know that Knuth's "The
Art of Computer Programming" is one of them (I believe book
1-Fundamental Algorithms).

finite state machine
(definition) 

Definition: An abstract computer consisting of a set of states, a
start state, an  input alphabet, and a transition function which maps
input symbols and current states to a next state. The computer begins
in the start state with an input string. It changes to new states
determined the transition function. There are many variants, for
instance, machines having actions (outputs) associated transitions
(Mealy machine) or states (Moore machine), multiple start states,
transitions conditioned on no input symbol (a null) or more than one
transition for a given symbol and state (nondeterministic finite state
machine), one or more states designated as accepting states
(recognizer), etc. Also known as a finite state automaton.

See also deterministic finite state machine, Kripke structure,
transducer,  Markov chain, hidden Markov model.

Note: Equivalent to a restricted Turing machine where the head is
read-only and shifts only from left to right. (After Algorithms and
Theory of Computation Handbook, page 24-19.)

This quote was lifted from 
http://hissa.nist.gov/dads/HTML/finiteStateMachine.html


----------------------------------
Eric N. Wilson
President
Doulos Software and Computer Services


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