Didactic approach for teaching nondeterminism in automata theory

Didactic Approach for Teaching Nondeterminism in Automata Theory

Nondeterminism plays a central role in almost all fields of computer science. It has been incorporated naturally as well as in the theory of automata as a generalization of determinism. Although nondeterministic finite automata do not have more recognition power than deterministic ones their importance and usefulness is of no doubt. Unfortunately, the operation of the mathematical model of nond...

Didactic Games for Teaching Information Theory

We developed a set of didactic games and activities that can be used to illustrate and teach various concepts from Information Theory. For each of the games and activities we list the topics it covers, give its rules and related information, describe our practical experiences and give an overview of its scientific background. We also discuss the proper ways to integrate these games into the kno...

Regulated Nondeterminism in Pushdown Automata

Quantifying Nondeterminism in Finite Automata

Various ways of quantifying the nondeterminism in finite automata have been considered since the 1970’s. Roughly speaking, a nondeterminism measure can count the number of accepting computations (ambiguity), the number of all computations (computation width) or the amount of nondeterminism on a single best (or worst) computation on a given input. This paper surveys results on the growth rate of...

Measuring Nondeterminism in Pushdown Automata

The amount of nondeterminism that a pushdown automaton requires to recognize an input string can be measured by the minimum number of guesses that it must make to accept the string, where guesses are measured in bits of information. When this quantity is unbounded, the rate at which it grows as the length of the string increases serves as a measure of the pushdown automaton’s “rate of consumpti...