Day 27: mat385

Last time

Next time

• Announcements:
  • During class time I'll be on Zoom, should you have any questions.

    https://nku.zoom.us/j/7057440907.

  • An important word on Pass/Fail from our chair, Dr. Buckley.
    • I highlight, in bold, the important piece which the university isn't highlighting in the FAQ for students....

  • Your 9.3 homework has been graded (key).

    A couple of comments:

    1. Participation fell off for these homeworks: but this is one of my favorite topics! I always like to emphasize this stuff.... This time will be no exception.

    2. Some of these problems were really challenging. So it's always disappointing to see no (or little) work. You need to show work -- and you'll need to show it for the final.

    3. Some of these problems require some insight, or creativity. I think of that as fun, but some folks don't like them because you can't black-box them. This is one of the reasons why it's important to show your work, or your thought process.

    4. Some of you made good use of trees in trying to solve some of these problems (e.g. tracing the operation of a FSM).

  • Your final is next week, Wednesday. I'll assume that you can take it at 2:00 -- let me know if that will be a problem, and we'll make arrangements.
    1. The final is cumulative.
    2. It will be half new and half old material.
    3. I shoot for it to be two hours long.
    4. Some old finals

  • No more new homeworks!

  • I had a couple of questions about one of the FSMs on the first homework, so I'll start there.

• Today:
  • I've got a couple of videos:
    1. One featuring another example of creating a FSM: Exercise 12, p. 752 (and the marked-up version from the video: Exercise 12, p. 752)

    2. One on a connection between Lewis Carroll's Logic Game and the Karnaugh map (Carroll-n-Karnaugh -- here's the sketch of the relationship).

    3. One more on summary thoughts for the back half of the course.

• Links:
  • We dropped the idea of projects. But here's mine!:) I love FSMs, and have implemented them in lisp, etc. But I've been using some compartmental modeling software for my math modeling class, and realized that we could use that for building a little FSM. So I thought that I'd make something useful -- the binary adder.

    So if you want to try the binary adder I created, here ya go. And it's easy enough to build other little machines (but there are certain pains, because we're using a tool which really wasn't intended for this....

    1. You can get a free account on InsightMaker

    2. Open up My binary adder FSM at InsightMaker. "Clone" it (upper right) -- then you'll own your own copy (and can change it to make your own FSM).

    3. You need to make two changes: set the two binary numbers' values, and then within "Settings" you need to set the length of the simulation. Then "Simulate" will run the machine, and generate the sum.

    4. This writes the input vectors for random integers (with padding), and tells what settings to fix, etc. Also the expected output, so one can confirm that the machine is working....

    5. The instructions are included in the insight, at right. I've made a little video to illustrate how it works -- to walk you through it. Take a stroll, if you like!:)

    6. I built a little FSM to do the recognition of Exercise 26b, p. 754 -- set of all strings where the number of 0s is a multiple of 3.