nLab
nondeterministic automaton

Definitions

(For the moment, mostly as an example of a coalgebra for an endofunctor and to start discussion of models for non-determinism.)

This will give the classical definition as a non-deterministic state-based system and then show how to turn that form into the coalgebraic form.

Definition

A non-deterministic automaton consists of the following data:

• a set of states, $Q$;

• a set, $\Sigma$, of input symbols ;

• a function, $\delta :Q\times \Sigma \to 𝒫(Q)$, called the next state relation,

and

• a predicate, $\mathrm{final}:Q\to \mathrm{bool}=\{\perp ,\top \}$, the boolean domain.

In the usual interpretation if the automaton is in state $q$, and is ‘given’ the input $\sigma$, then it changes to being in one of the states in the subset, $\delta (q,\sigma )$, of $Q$.

The ‘final’ predicate, of course, returns $\top$ if a state is a final state and $\perp$ otherwise. (There will, in general, be a set of final or ‘accept’ states.)

(For the moment we will not look at the links between automata and languages.)

Currying $\delta$

The first step in transforming this to the coalgebraic form is to curry $\delta$, so as to obtain it in the form $\delta :Q\to 𝒫(Q{)}^{\Sigma }$. We thus have for a state, $q\in Q$, $\delta (q,):\Sigma \to 𝒫(Q)$. We then also have a product function

$$\alpha =\delta \times (\mathrm{final}):Q\to Q^{\Sigma }\times \mathrm{bool}.$$\alpha = \delta \times (final) : Q \to Q^\Sigma\times bool.

If we now write $\mathrm{HQ}=𝒫(Q{)}^{\Sigma }\times \mathrm{bool}$, we get a functor (for you to check) $H:\mathrm{Set}\to \mathrm{Set}$ and the non-deterministic automaton corresponded precisely to a coalgebra, $(Q,\alpha )$, for $H$.

References

For a summary of automata theory , look at the Wikipedia.

For a thorough treatment, see

• M. V. Lawson, Finite Automata, Google books

or other texts on the subject.

For the coalgebraic treatment, this is discussed in:

• A.Kurz: Coalgebras and Modal Logic. Course Notes for ESSLLI 2001, Version of October 2001. Appeared on the CD-Rom ESSLLI’01, Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, Finland, available from site.