Automata theory

Lecture 1

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Program Title Systems and Computers Engineering

Course
Department offering and specs
Systems and Computers Engineering Dept.
responsible for the Program

Course Name Automata theory

Lectures Tutorial Practical

 Evaluation
 70 marks final
 30 marks class work

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 Course objectives
 Entry point for compiler theory
 Understand engineering principles for
automaton, finite state machine, DFA, NFA and
regular expressions.
 Recognize different types of automaton
 Write computer programs on professional levels
achieving acceptable quality measures in system
development

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 Syllabus
1. Introduction.
2. Finite Automata, Regular expression, Regular language
3. DFA, NFA, Context-Free Languages
4. Turing Machine
5. Decidability
6. Reducibility
7. Time Complexity
8. Space Complexity
9. Intractability

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 Course Outline
 Regular Languages and their
descriptors:
 Finite automata, nondeterministic finite
automata, regular expressions.
 Algorithms to decide questions about
regular languages, e.g., is it empty?
 Closure properties of regular languages.

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 Course Outline – (2)
 Context-free languages and their
descriptors:
 Context-free grammars, pushdown
automata.
 Decision and closure properties.

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 Course Outline – (3)
 Recursive and recursively enumerable
languages.
 Turing machines, decidability of problems.
 The limit of what can be computed.
 Intractable problems.
 Problems that (appear to) require
exponential time.
 NP-completeness and beyond.
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 Definition
Automata theory is the study of
abstract computing devices or
“machines” Before there were
computers
Finite automata is a simpler kinds of
machines originally proposed to model
brain function!

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 Why automata
 Regular expressions are used in many
systems.
 E.g., UNIX a.*b.
 E.g., DTD’s describe XML tags with a RE
format like person (name, addr, child*).
 Finite automata models communication
protocols, electronic circuits.
 Theory is used in model-checking.
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 Why automata
 Software for designing and checking the
behavior of digital circuits
 The “lexical analyzer” of a typical compiler (the
compiler component that breaks the input text into logical units
such as identifiers, keywords and blocks)
 Software for verifying systems of all types that
have a finite number of distinct states

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Why automata

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 Turing machine
 Design a program/machine that determine some
string (e.g. x=“then”) is in java language?
 What about “there”
 Or “than”
 A Turing Machine is a mathematical model
(automata) which accepts the languages generated
by grammar. Alan Turing invented that machine
1936
 Did you watch the “imitation game, 2014”
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Example automata

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 How? – (2)
 Context-free grammars are used to
describe the syntax of essentially every
programming language.
 Not to forget their important role in
describing natural languages.
 And DTD’s taken as a whole, are really
CFG’s.

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 How? – (3)
 When developing solutions to real
problems, we often confront the
limitations of what software can do.
 Undecidable things – no program
whatever can do it. (e.g. the halting problem)
 Intractable things – there are programs,
but no fast programs (e.g. TSP, VRP)
 This course gives you the tools.
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 How? – (3)
 We’ll learn how to deal formally with
discrete systems.
 Proofs: You never really prove a program
correct, but you need to be thinking of why
a tricky technique really works.
 We’ll gain experience with abstract
models and constructions.
 Models layered software architectures.
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 Automata concepts
 Alphabet
 Set of symbols

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 Automata concepts
 Strings
 Finite sequence of symbols from alphabet
 Has length
 Empty string Ɛ,

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 Automata concepts
 Strings
 String concatenation

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 Automata concepts
 Power of alphabet
 Exponential notation Σk

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 Automata concepts
 Power of alphabet
 The set of all strings Σ*
 The set of all strings except empty string Σ+

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 Automata concepts
 Language
 The set of strings chosen from Σ*
 Set-formers notation

 Examples 1
 Language: Java, alphabet: ASCII
 Example 2
 Language of equal number of 0&1 Lq={00,11,000,1111}
 The language of all prime numbers Lp={10, 11, 101} 23
 Automata concepts
 Problem
 Decide whether a string is member of the
language

 Example
 S1=“0011101”, S2=“00010”, S3=“1010”
 Given a string of 0 & 1, say “yes” if this string is
member of prime language Lp, and “no” otherwise
 Solution requires computational resources (e.g.
space and time)
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 Wrap up
 Finite automata: states & transitions for building
several different kinds of software
 Regular expression: structural notation for
describing the same patterns that can be
represented by finite automata
 Context-free grammar: important notation for
describing the structure of programming languages
and related sets of strings
 Turing machine
 Alphabets
 Strings
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 Language and problems