Automata and Formal

Languages
 Automata and Formal Languages
• What is a Finite Automaton?
• Why study Automata?
• What the course is about?
 What is a Finite Automaton?
• Remembers only a finite amount of information.
• Information represented by its state.
• State changes in response to inputs.
• Rules that tell how the state changes in response to inputs are called
transitions.
What is a Finite Automaton?
What is a Finite Automaton?
Why study Automata?
 Why study Automata?

• Regular expressions are used in many systems.

• E.g., UNIX [A-Z][a-z]*[ ][A-Z][A-Z].
• This expression represents patterns in text that could be a city and state, e.g. Ithaca NY
• E.g., DTD’s describe XML tags with a RE format like person (name, addr, child*).
 Why study Automata?

• Finite automata model protocols, electronic circuits.

 Why study Automata?
• Context-free grammars are used to describe the syntax of essentially every
programming language.
• Not to forget their important role in describing natural languages.
 Why study Automata?
• When developing solutions to real problems, we often confront the
limitations of what software can do.
• Undecidable things – no program whatever can do it.
• Intractable things – there are programs, but no fast programs.
 Course Outline
• Finite Automata
• Regular Expressions
• Context-Free Grammars
• Pushdown Automata
• Turing Machines
 The Central Concepts of Automata Theory
• Alphabets
• An alphabet is a finite nonempty set of symbols.
• Conventionally we use the symbol  for an alphabet
• Common alphabets include:
•   , the binary alphabet
•   a, b, …., z, the set of all lower-case letters
• The set of all ASCII characters, or the set of all printable ASCII characters
 The Central Concepts of Automata Theory
• Strings
• A string (or sometimes word) is a finite sequence of symbols chosen from some
alphabet.
• 01101 is a string from the binary alphabet   
• 111 is another string chosen from this alphabet
• The Empty String: the string with zero occurrences of symbols.
• denoted 
• is a string that may be chosen from any alphabet whatsoever
• Length of a String: the number of positions for symbols in the string
• string 01101 has length 5
• the standard notation for the length of a string  is 
• 011 = 3 và  = 0
 The Central Concepts of Automata Theory
• Strings
• Powers of an Alphabet
• If  is an alphabet, we can express the set of all strings of a certain length from that alphabet by
using an exponential notation.
• k to be the set of strings of length k, each of whose symbols is in 
• 0 = {}, regardless of what alphabet  is
• that is  is the only string whose length is 0
•   : 1 = {0, 1}, 2 = {00, 01, 10, 11}, 3 = {000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111}, …….
• * : the set of all strings over an alphabet 
• * = ,  , 00, 01, 10, 11, 000, …..
• * = 0  1  2  ………
• +: set of nonempty strings from alphabet 
• two appropriate equivalences
• + = 1  2  3  ………
• * = +  {}
 The Central Concepts of Automata Theory
• Strings
• Concatenation of Strings
• Let x and y be strings.
• Then xy denotes the concatenation of x and y
• the string formed by making a copy of x and following it by a copy of y
• let x = 01101 and y = 110, then xy = 01101110 and yx = 11001101
 The Central Concepts of Automata Theory
• Languages
• A set of strings all of which are chosen from some *, where  is a particular
alphabet is called a language.
• If  is an alphabet and L  * then L is a language over 
• Notice that a language over  need not include strings with all the symbols of 
• There are also many other languages that appear when we study automata
• The language of all strings consisting of n 0’s followed by n 1’s for some n  0: , 1 0011,
000111, …..
• The set of strings of 0’s and 1’s with an equal number of each: , 1 10, 0011, 0101, 1001,
…..
• The set of binary numbers whose value is a prime: {10, 11, 101, 111, 1011, …..
• * is a language for any alphabet 
• , the empty language, is a language over any alphabet
• , the language consisting of only the empty string, is also a language over any alphabet.
• Notice that   ; the former has no strings and the latter has one string.
 Problems
• If  is an alphabet, and L is a language over  then the problem L is:
• Given a string w in *, decide whether or not w is in L.
 Set-Formers as a Way to Define Languages
• It is common to describe a language using a “set-former”
{w | something about w}
This expression is read “the set of words w such that (whatever is said about w to the
right of the vertical bar)”
• {w | w consists of an equal number of 0’s and 1’s }
• {w | w is a binary integer that is prime }
• {w | w is a syntactically correct C program }
• It is also common to replace w by some expression with parameters and describe the
strings in the language by stating conditions on the parameters
• {0n1n | n  1}
• {0i1j | 0  i  j}