Deterministic Adaptive Finite Automata

The investigation of determinism issues in formal adaptive devices is particularly important when designing formal adaptive devices that must exhibit high operation performance. In the special case of adaptive formalisms, there is a serious difficulty related to determinism assurance, since their inherent self-modifying behavior makes it very difficult to assure that determinism is kept throughout the device’s operation. This work formally states the concept of determinism for adaptive finite-state automata, a class of adaptive devices that is particularly important for their relative simplicity. By studying this particular formalism, some generalizations to the adaptive devices were proposed. In addition, a set of requirements that should be satisfied in order to obtain deterministic adaptive finite-state automata were stated and a specific subclass of deterministic adaptive devices was defined.