Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!cbnewsh!dwc
From: dwc@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Malaclypse the Elder)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: UNIX history made easy
Message-ID: <4961@cbnewsh.ATT.COM>
Date: 20 Oct 89 17:03:04 GMT
References: <17085@rpp386.cactus.org> <8600002@kolmogorov> <11266@smoke.BRL.MIL> <10027@alice.UUCP>
Organization: The Legion of Dynamic Discord
Lines: 32

In article <10027@alice.UUCP>, andrew@alice.UUCP (Andrew Hume) writes:
> 
> 
> this strand about ken is silly enough without me adding to it
> but ken is famous for more than unix. he did some important
> work early on (1960's) with regular expressions, establishing
> a formal method to transform finite-state machines into
> equivalent non-deterministic finite automata. this is related
> to the patent he holds for implementing regular expression recognisers.

its been about ten years since i took my finite state automata class
so i'm not clear about the difference between finite state machines
and finite automata, but are you referring to the method of transforming
a non-deterministic finite state automaton into a deterministic one?
it involves creating new states that are the cross products of the
states of the non-deterministic machine.

if so, i did not know that ken thompson was the "inventor" of this
method.  i school, it was presented as a proof that the two are
equivalent in power.

which i guess brings me to my point.  it is quite *centric (fill
in the * with anything that matches an appropriate personality) of
the people arguing about what constitutes a scientist.  it is silly
to say that one is only a scientist if one knows what i know.  but
there are a couple of things that are "useful" to know (in my *centric view):
scientific method and in a related way, where/how to find things out.

this is my opinion.

danny
att!hocus!dwc