Week 10.

Last week's lecture was pretty nice (except the disappointing test mark). I always liked DFSA. I like their names too. "Deterministic automaton". It has a nice sound and reminds me of automatons in some expansion of Age of Mythology and Syberia II.
We also learned the formal definition of a DFSA which was very interesting. I always liked the formalizations of intuitive concepts like functions, graphs, trees, DFSA's. Every time I read about one of them, I am happily surprised by how complete it is and how closely it matches the intuitive notion. Also, it gives a reassuring feeling (since now things can actually be proved about them without relying on hand-waiving (which I always found troubling)) and a feeling of empowerment since it is a discovery that math is much broader and more powerful than the 12 years of studying algebraic manipulations and simple R->R functions might have led us to believe.
Although DFSA's aren't really new to me. In fact, we did an example where we had to construct a DFSA that accepted only strings containing the substring "110" (or maybe some other substring of length three, I don't remember the exact one). It brought back good memories of CSC148 and the O(n) substring searching problem. Since thursday I have been trying to remember the algorithm used for creating the DFSA for a general substring. So far, I am unsuccessful.

Unfortunately I will not be able to go to class on the 20th until 7:30. I am reading ahead to compensate.