Next: -Nondeterministic Finite Automata Up: Finite Automata for Regular Previous: Simplifying DFAs
Nondeterministic Finite Automata
Suppose we want to convert an NFAM into an DFAM'.
We can formalize this transformation into an algorithm and prove that it is correct.
We could speed up this algorithm considerably, in most cases. Notice that the this algorithm requires time in 
. But it considers several very uninteresting sets of states. It looks at transitions which are never really possible on the original NFA! A better algorithm would only look at ``useful'' or ``accessible'' possibitilities. That is, something like this is usually going to be faster:
Essentially, this does a depth-first search of the transition graph from the first idea, starting with the starting state and ignoring all unreachable nodes.
James Foster
Wed Sep 18 16:53:17 PDT 1996