What is the enlightenment I'm supposed to attain after studying finite automata?

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 3:46 PM UTC

dbaupp wrote: post #33

mcmatterson wrote: post #12

Honestly, my answer to this came about many years after living through a very theoretical CS undergrad, by way of a chapter in Charles Petzold's book, 'Code' (of all things. I originally bought the book for my dad to help him understand 'what it was I did all day'). Basically, the insight centered around the physicality of how FA are taught; FA are usually taught by thinking of the FA itself as being fixed in space,…

It sounds a bit like you are talking about a Turing machine rather than a finite automaton (the latter is much weaker than the former in computational power). (Not that it matters much, your point still stands.)

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 4:12 PM UTC

derleth wrote: post #14

ctdonath wrote: post #9

When you understand a subject well enough, the true basics become fascinating. Without the full round trip from introduction to complexity to revealed simplicity, the basics are nigh unto incomprehensible - yet giving new students an intro thereto at least shows them where they are going. Quantum mechanics is simple, but baffling to beginners; give them a taste and the "aha" moment will come in time. A = {0|1,...} A[…

> Quantum mechanics is simple, but baffling to beginners Quantum mechanics is weird to us because we're human-sized and quantum effects are mostly gone at our scale. Therefore, the only language we have for actually doing quantum mechanics is mathematics, so it makes sense to get a firm grasp of the math first. Fortunately, the fundamentals of the math aren't that difficult. I like to think of quantum mechanics as be…

Post by upquark » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #41

dbaupp wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds a bit like you are talking about a Turing machine rather than a finite automaton (the latter is much weaker than the former in computational power). (Not that it matters much, your point still stands.)

They are equivalent. None of them is weaker. And, by the way, your PC (Von Neuman architecture) is an example of finite automatum. I've seen the FA formalism used in computing theory a few times. Yet, I'm also missing whatever enlightment the author is looking for. But, if for no other reason, it's worth learning just because it's a very nice tool.

Post by DeepDuh » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 6:02 PM UTC

Post by Goladus » Mon, Dec 24, 2012, 6:19 PM UTC

charlieflowers wrote: post #13

jacquesm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider me extremely jealous that you are studying under Prof. Aho, he's one of the greats. Statemachines are an incredibly useful tool. I've spent the better part of last year untangling a huge pile of code and the solution in the end was to split it all up into statemachines that communicate with each other using simple synchronous messages. That and that alone made the problem tractable. (Tractable to me, that is…

Would love to get your recommendations for good reading on state machines, please. Getting curation from a someone who understands them well and uses them in practice often would be fantastic.