Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Pumping Lemma

Found an interesting article about pumping lemma, it is a poetry about pumping lemma. Here it is.

The Pumping Lemma, in poetic form

“Any regular language L has a magic number p
And any long-enough word in L has the following property:
Amongst its first p symbols is a segment you can find
Whose repetition or omission leaves x amongst its kind.”

“So if you find a language L which fails this acid test,
And some long word you pump becomes distinct from all the rest,
By contradiction you have shown that language L is not
A regular guy, resiliant to the damage you have wrought.”

“But if, upon the other hand,x stays within its L ,
Then either L is regular, or else you chose not well.
For w is xyz, and cannot be null,
And y must come before p symbols have been read in full.”

“As mathematical postscript, an addendum to the wise:
The basic proof we outlined here does certainly generalize.
So there is a pumping lemma for all languages context-free,
Although we do not have the same for those that are r.e.”

By Martin Cohn and Harry Mairson

1 comment:

Danny Heap said...

I really enjoyed the poem. I'll have to work in a reference to future instances of this course.