Determinism and Finite Automata—A Primer

1 · Jeremy Kun · July 2, 2011, 11:41 p.m.
Summary
The first step in studying the sorts of possible computations (and more interestingly, those things which cannot be computed) is to define exactly what we mean by a “computation.” At a high level, this is easy: a computation is simply a function. Given some input, produce the appropriate output. Unfortunately this is much too general. For instance, we could define almost anything we want in terms of functions. Let $ f$ be the function which accepts as input the date of California Super Lotto dra...