Finite-State Automaton To/From Regular Expression Visualization
Marco T. Morazán, Tijana Minić · Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science · 2024
Most Formal Languages and Automata Theory courses explore the duality between computation models to recognize words in a language and computation models to generate words in a language.For students unaccustomed to formal statements, these transformations are rarely intuitive.To assist students with such transformations, visualization tools can play a pivotal role.This article presents visualization tools developed for FSM-a domain-specific language for the Automata Theory classroomto transform a finite state automaton to a regular expression and vice versa.Using these tools, the user may provide an arbitrary finite-state machine or an arbitrary regular expression and step forward and step backwards through a transformation.At each step, the visualization describes the step taken.The tools are outlined, their implementation is described, and they are compared with related work.In addition, empirical data collected from a control group is presented.The empirical data suggests that the tools are well-received, effective, and learning how to use them has a low extraneous cognitive load.