A collection of tools for making automata theory and formal languages come alive
SIGCSE '97 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
SIGCSE '99 The proceedings of the thirtieth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Using theoretical computer simulators for formal languages and automata theory
ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
An animated turning machine simulator in forms /e
An animated turning machine simulator in forms /e
An interactive spreadsheet for teaching the forward-backward algorithm
ETMTNLP '02 Proceedings of the ACL-02 Workshop on Effective tools and methodologies for teaching natural language processing and computational linguistics - Volume 1
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This paper describes a novel translation of a Nondeterministic Finite Automation (NFA) into a spreadsheet suitable for a program such as Microsoft Excel or Gnumeric. This translation can help students understand the structure of an NFA and provide a simple means to animate the NFA's actions to determine if it accepts an input string.A student can manually enter the spreadsheet cells corresponding to a particular NFA using only simple arithmetic expressions and formulas that involve the if function. For a complex NFA with many states and transitions, a manual entry process can be quite time-consuming and error-prone. We have written a Perl program that translates a NFA description given as an input text file into an output text file format that can be imported directly into commonly-available spreadsheet programs.The student can use the spreadsheet dynamically to "play" with the NFA: by giving it strings to accept/reject; by changing the set of accept states; and by changing the symbols that are associated with state transitions.