Alternating Finite Automata
摘要
Nondeterminism is a concept that is not inherently self-dual in the following sense: a nondeterministic automaton may intuitively “guess” at some point to make a choice that turns out to be good for accepting a word. This is why it is typically easy to construct NFA for languages which are defined via existential quantification, for instance \(\sum^{*} aba\sum^{*}\) – the set of all words for which there is a subword of the form aba. Consider, however, its complement – the set of all words that do not contain the subword aba.