[GAP Forum] Automata package released

[Edmund Robertson]

Dear GAP Forum,

I announce, with great pleasure, that the Automata package, by Manuel
Delgado, Steve Linton and Joao Morais has been accepted as a refereed
GAP package and is available for download from the GAP Web site, and
FTP sites, or from the authors Web page at

http://www.fc.up.pt/cmup/mdelgado/automata/

The following brief description of the functionality of the package is
based on the authors' description.

The features of the Automata package include:

- computing a rational expression for the language recognized by a
finite automaton and computing an automaton for the language given by a
rational expression;

- computing an equivalent deterministic automaton to a given
non-deterministic automaton;

- standard constructions such as intersection automata and product 
automata

- minimalising a deterministic finite automaton;

- constructing an inverse automaton corresponding to a subgroup of a 
free group via a flower automaton and Stallings foldings;

- visualizing automata graphically (using the external program 
GraphViz) This convenient tool presently works only under LINUX.


Edmund Robertson

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Professor E F Robertson
Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Computational Algebra
School of Mathematics and Statistics
Mathematical Institute
University of St Andrews
St Andrews  KY16 9SS
Scotland

Email: edmund at mcs.st-and.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)1334 463743
Fax: +44 (0)1334 463748

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