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A.4.3 Non-deterministic FSM
Till now we have talked about deterministic FSM (DFSM), where at every step of computation by
an FSM, the next state was uniquely determined. Although for most of the actual application of FSM
theory we would definitely like to work in terms of DFSMs, the concept of non-determinism is very
useful in the process of deriving such a machine. It also had considerable influence on the theory of
automata. A non-deterministic FSM (NDFSM, NFA) is a generalization of DFSM and thus every
DFSM (DFA) is also an NDFSM (NFA).
A small NDFSM is shown in Fig. A.9.
An NDFSM has one or more of the following ...