November, Week 11

Another week has passed... And it is also almost the second last week before the exams. Which are pretty much the end of this semester. Which means that the end of this whole school year is also almost over, only one more semester to go. And from there graduation is not so far away. In terms of CSC236, this week was about different applications and techniques of FSA's. I found the cartesian product of two DFSA technique quite interesting. For some reason I thought that,

despite the fact that there always exists a union of two regular expressions (and therefore two DFSA's), the way to find this union is more or less trivial. And summing up what we have learned this week, it turns out that there exists an actual technique. By building DFSA's of both regexes, then using cartesian product to get a union DFSA, and finally decomposing it to get the final regex, you can pretty much find any union. And this means it is easy to find any possible regex. Just divide it into smaller parts and use the technique to find intersections. Very nice.