Talk:Finite-state automaton

Finite State Machine (FSM) is what we call it in our electronics course. I think FSM is a more commonly used term than FSA, at least in engeneering. For that reason, I made a page Finite state machine that redirects to here. --Aardwolf 14:39, 20 Oct 2005 (GMT)

We used FSM in our Natural Language Processing course, but FSA in our Computation Theory course. Obviously different fields use different terminology. --Safalra 14:58, 20 Oct 2005 (GMT)

Two kinds of FSA language

It seems to me that languages classed as being in the FSA computational class actually fall into two categories:

• Those in which the language sets the limit.
• Those in which there's no language-imposed limit, but every program is forced to impose an upper bound on its number of states. Essentially, it would be a language capable of implementing arbitrarily large FSAs, but nothing more powerful.

Should these really be two separate computational classes? -- Smjg 14:08, 24 November 2007 (UTC)