In my last post, “Kleene’s Theorem,” I provided some useful background information about strings, regular languages, regular expressions, and finite automata before introducing the eponymously named theorem that has become one of the cornerstones of artificial intelligence and more specifically, natural language processing (NLP). Kleene’s Theorem tells us that regular expressions and finite state automata …
Tag: strings
Nov 17 2017
Kleene’s Theorem
Stephen Cole Kleene was an American mathematician who’s groundbreaking work in the sub-field of logic known as recursion theory laid the groundwork for modern computing. While most computer programmers might not know his name or the significance of his work regarding computable functions, I am willing to bet that anyone who has ever dealt with …
Nov 09 2017
Not String Theory – String Facts
As a computer programmer for more than a quarter of century, I don’t think I have ever thought much about strings. I knew the basics. In every language I’d worked with, strings were a data type unto themselves. Superficially they are a sequence of characters, but behind the scenes, computers store and manipulate them as …