Very simple finite automaton (?) I am not sure if this is and example of Finite Automaton or a Finite State Machine or perhaps it is related to a transition table or markov process. I am not a math person so i am not sure what it is called. I googled around and got lots of super complicated gobbledegoo all with knotty regex stuff, but what i want to do is much more simple.
I am trying to use a table (called a transition table? i dunno) to define a bunch of moves like so: 1 --> 2 5 2 --> 1 4 3 --> 3 4 --> 1 5 --> 4 3 so that i can generate a sequence that, given an initial value, will continue to grow according to these rules. So starting with 1, we get: 1 2 5 1 4 4 3 2 5 1 1 3 1 4 4 3 2 5 2 5 3 ..... etc. Essentially, iterating over the last added items to the list, applying the table, adding those new items to the list, applying the table again... etc, until the sequence reaches some predetermined number of iterations and quits. [ [1], [2, 5], [1, 4] , [4, 3], [2, 5], [1], [1], [3], [1, 4], [4, 3], [2, 5], [2, 5], [3] ] First, I would like to know what, precisely, this kind of process is called so that i can look it up. Many names are suggested but when googling more names and acronyms show up, maybe there are many names used for a variety of related things, but I could be curious to know exactly what this is an instance of. Second, I am not sure how to get started with the loop (is this an example of recursion?) and how best to represent the table (dictionary)? If anyone has an example of how to do this or a suggestion on where to start poking around, that would be great. cheers, kp macosx, python2.5 & 2.6 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list