Customer Reviews

Automata Theory

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Based on this book I tried to get introduced into the field of automata theory. But, alas, this was a complete failure: This book comes with nearly no text between the formulae (and I'm not afraid of formulae!) so there's NO way to understand the stuff introduced in this book. An example: In the first chapter semigroups were introduced and it wasn't clear at all what the relationship to sequential automata is. To summarize: If you need an introductiory text: Don't use this, this is more a collection of formulae probably helpful for the expert but not for starters.

The book uses not-so-common mathematical conventions which makes the reading hard. A more comprehensive book would show students how to work out the kinds of problems that are given at the end of each chapter. Most theorems are stated but are not proven (or the proof is described scantily) and by and large the book is a collection of statements about grammars, FSAs, Turing machines etc. It lacks an educational flow. The excerpts in the beginning of each chapter from the lives of Central-American slave owners are completely uncalled for.

Automata Theory by Matthew Simon is an unusually welcome book. The many examples shown include subjects not often covered, such as: the Chomsky-Schutzenberger Theorem, Kuroda Normal Forms, Ginsberg-Griebach Theorem, Simple Pushdown Automata, Syntactic Pattern Recognition, and Shape Grammers. The use of a consistent and standard notation throughout the book is also welcome, as many different subjects are discussed. The focus of the first chapter is upon Semigroups and Automata Theory(including wreath products), from a more elementary, less abstract, less mathematical viewpoint than that found in the dozen or so books covering this subject. Thus examples from automata theory are emphasized. While departures from the notation of Clifford and Preston do take place, the notation is as close as one can come to being standard, as no standard notation currently exists. Each chapter starts with a commentary or quotes relating to subjects that arise in socially oriented linguistics and automata theory. Such commentary is often omitted in books covering automata theory but is of interest to people studying Anthropological Linguistics, General (historical)Linguistics, Philosophical Linguistics, and other academic areas dealing with linguistics, but often neglected by the engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics communities.