Finite Automata

Automata (singular : automation) are a particularly simple, but useful, model of computation. They were initially proposed as a simple model for the behavior of neurons. The concept of a finite automaton appears to have arisen in the 1943 paper “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity", by Warren McCullock and Walter Pitts. In 1951 Kleene introduced regular expressions to describe the behaviour of finite automata. He also proved the important theorem saying that regular expressions exactly capture the behaviours of finite automata. In 1959, Dana Scott and Michael Rabin introduced non-deterministic automata and showed the surprising theorem that they are equivalent to deterministic automata. We will study these fundamental results. Since those early years, the study of automata has continued to grow, showing that they are indeed a fundamental idea in computing.