Tcepsa's Thoughts

It's kind of spooky that this actually makes sense to me:

A deterministic finite automaton is a structure

M = (Q, E, d, s, F) where

• Q is a finite set, the states
• E is a finite set, the input alphabet
• d : Q X E -> Q is the transition function that maps each of the possible combinations of (state, input) pairs to a state.
• s is a member of Q and known as the start state
• F is a subset of Q and elements of F are known as accept or final states

(Kozen, Automata and Computability, Springer-Verlag New York, 1997)

I got shivers when I read the one about d : Q X E -> Q and understood it... being able to pull that kind of meaning out of such a small handful of symbols makes me more inclined than ever to try to learn more mathematical notation (and the fact that I get all tingly from reading it probably explains a bit about why I like regular expressions so much as well ^_^)