NFA Problem Discussion - Book Report/Review Example

There are also the nondeterministic finite automata used to find occurrences of various keywords on the Web. The words on a document are fed, which then presents occurrences of the keywords in the text. The document also discusses how we can apply a subset construction to any NFA. Nevertheless, when applied, the number of states of the DFA is less than the number of states of the NFA.

The document also introduced a new extension of the finite automaton, which allows a transition on epsilon transitions. Effectively, an NFA is permitted to make a transition devoid of receiving an input symbol. This fresh capability does not expand the class of languages, which can be endorsed by finite automata, but offers a programming convenience.

The document concludes by creating informal treatments of e-NFAs with transition diagrams. It says that we can imagine the automaton as recognizing those sequences of labels along paths to an accepting state from the start state. Nevertheless, every e along a path is “invisible” meaning that it aids nothing to the string along the path.