Finite State Machines
Things have been quite hectic on my end. I sent in my thesis draft for evaluation last week. Now I have two months to finish the thesis and everything I promised in it. This was why I missed last week’s mail.
I ended up writing my thesis by hand. Of course, I typed it up into digital format. But, it turns out, writing by hand is more efficient than directly typing stuff up. There seems to be some research into note-taking habits, and the conclusion is to use paper to take notes. Taking notes on paper is shown to be far superior for recalling and understanding concepts. The articles can be found here and here.
Finite State Machines
In the last few years, I have grown fond of Finite-state machines. Not only because it is central to my thesis, but because of the simplicity they offer for designing systems.
Alfonso de la Rocha has an excellent post on designing and coding with FSMs. He gives an excellent introduction to FSM and then demonstrates their use via code.
Chris Wellons has another great post about the use of FSM. I love his morse code decoder example. It is such an elegant way to use FSMs. He gives other examples and uses co-routines and generators to show the implementation.
The post is dense and needs some pondering to understand everything, but the rewards are worth it. State machines are a powerful tool, and it’s worth spending some time getting comfortable with them.
I’m pretty sure I will keep coming back to this topic in the near future.
Here is a comparision of text editors to Lord of the Rings. Enjoy :)