Note by @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

You can, in fact, learn things from #AI. I asked AI the question "But how can I do this without using an LLM or hardcoding everything myself?" Now I know more than I did before about Finite-state machines. Plus used an LLM to rip an #LLM out of a tool I use.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

I would, of course, guess that about 10 percent of the things I now know about Finite-state machines are wrong. But finding that out doesn't cost me anything, really.

x0 @x0@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge I actually learned about finite state machines, pushdown automata, and the like as part of my degree. A deterministic FSM is pretty simple. I personally implement them as an enum and a function which is called repeatedly with a switch/case statement on a continuously changing state variable. About the most direct form of such a thing.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@x0 Yeah, I don't have a degree, I think that's the issue. So I just kind of do stuff, even though I've worked in the industry for 20 years.

x0 @x0@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge Meh, honestly it isn't necessary if you can learn by other means. Half the theoretical shit I got a basis in and promptly forgot only surfaced much later in the middle of something unrelated. I had also effectively reinvented the finite state machine years before I even went to college and just learned the formal name for a thing I built when I was 15.

x0 @x0@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge I used that whole computer languages and automata theory more than most I think because as I lived in BGT land I had to hand-roll way more parsers than anyone ought to be doing. And a parser is an automaton that accepts a language of the correct form.

x0 @x0@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge I wrote, from first principles in BGT, a fully functional JSON parser sans Unicode with multiple escaping modes, two orthogonal dialects in one system which allowed me to construct a string specification in order to parse a user inputted string, refined multiple textual map dialects where delimiters weren't enough, and when I moved to NVGT then wrote a msgpack parser.

MostlyBlindGamer @MostlyBlindGamer@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge awesome! State machines power everything from communications protocols to video game systems and NPCs.
If you’re getting into this type of theory, definitely learn about truth tables. They’ll magically clean up your state transitions.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@MostlyBlindGamer Yes, my entire afternoon actually got stolen, because I suddenly decided I had to go write an entire mud built around these things, with cool npcs and a world with rules and and and. I think I'm better, now.