In the last two Tech Tuesdays, I introduced Finite State Machines (FSM) and showed examples of both their usefulness and their limitation. Just as a reminder, we study computer science theory to get a handle on two fundamental questions: what can be computed at all (computability)? And, how hard is it to compute something that can be computed (complexity)? The upshot on FSM is that they cannot compute a whole lot but what they can they do very efficiently. Let me flush both parts of that asse...

In the last two Tech Tuesdays, I introduced Finite State Machines (FSM) and showed examples of both their usefulness and their limitation. Just as a reminder, we study computer science theory to get a handle on two fundamental questions: what can be computed at all (computability)? And, how hard is it to compute something that can be computed (complexity)? The upshot on FSM is that they cannot compute a whole lot but what they can they do very efficiently. Let me flush both parts of that asse...