Deterministic automaton

In computer science, a deterministic automaton is a concept of automata theory in which the outcome of a transition from one state to another is determined by the input.^[1]

A common deterministic automaton is a deterministic finite automaton (DFA)) which is a finite state machine where for each pair of state and input symbol there is one and only one transition to a next state. DFAs recognize the set of regular languages and no other languages.^[2]

A standard way to build a deterministic finite automaton from a nondeterministic finite automaton is the powerset construction.^[3]

References

↑ Anderson (2006) p.41
↑ Anderson (2006) p.52
↑ Anderson (2006) p.44

Anderson, James A. (2006). Automata theory with modern applications. With contributions by Tom Head. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-61324-8. Zbl 1127.68049.

Automata theory: formal languages and formal grammars

Chomsky hierarchy	Grammars	Languages	Abstract machines

Type-0 — Type-1 — — — — — Type-2 — — Type-3 — —	Unrestricted (no common name) Context-sensitive Positive range concatenation Indexed — Linear context-free rewriting systems Tree-adjoining Context-free Deterministic context-free Visibly pushdown Regular — Non-recursive	Recursively enumerable Decidable Context-sensitive Positive range concatenation^* Indexed^* — Linear context-free rewriting language Tree-adjoining Context-free Deterministic context-free Visibly pushdown Regular Star-free Finite	Turing machine Decider Linear-bounded PTIME Turing Machine Nested stack Thread automaton — Embedded pushdown Nondeterministic pushdown Deterministic pushdown Visibly pushdown Finite Counter-free (with aperiodic finite monoid) Acyclic finite

Each category of languages, except those marked by a ^*, is a proper subset of the category directly above it. Any language in each category is generated by a grammar and by an automaton in the category in the same line.