Day 28, Mat385

Last time

Next time

Announcements:
- Our quiz covers sections 8.1 and 8.2:
  - Boolean Algebras
  - The three sides of the same coin: truth functions, logic networks, and Boolean expressions
- No quiz next week! We'll be reviewing next Thursday.
- Your projects are due on Friday of next week; your reviews are due on the Friday of finals week, at midnight.
Last time: We went over Section 8.3: Minimization.
There were two methods we considered:
1. The Karnaugh map (for up to four variables)
2. Quine-McCluskey (for an arbitrary number of variables).
Both produce a minimized sum of products from the cannonical sum of products. For just a few variables, the Karnaugh map made the most sense: it's visual pattern matching, on doughnuts....
The results are actually not optimal in every case: we noticed that there were simplifications that we could make that were not "on the radar" of these two techniques. They are limited in that they produce a sum of products, and we might factor (say) to simplify an expression further.
Today:
- It's on to our final topic: Finite-State Machines.
  We will hit the first part, which is creating machines to do binary addition (among other things).
  The second part, Tuesday, will cover recognition -- another task of FSMs -- and then minimization: again, an optimization issue. We'll end today on a machine that we will want to optimize; the question is how do we do that?

Links:

Website maintained by Andy Long. Comments appreciated.