Omer Zak <w...@zak.co.il> writes: > After a brief Google search: > Does anyone know about any research, theory or practice of time-varying > finite state machines?
Short answer: I don't. ;-) I'll offer a couple of thoughts, anyway. > I mean FSMs which might grow a new state, remove a state, add/subtract > transitions by means of meta-rules. I suppose it may be possible to write a FSM in such a way that adding/removing the allowed states and transitions dynamically would be possible. This would not be enough, though: any "interesting" FSM would not just formally move from one state to another but do custom stuff as a part of a transition, and one would want to create and load such custom code dynamically. I would *intuitively* think that an environment that has a comprehensive meta-object protocol (MOP), e.g., Common Lisp/CLOS, would allow one, in principle, to construct/modify/destroy new states/transitions/custom reactors at runtime. Were I presented with a research problem involving such "dynamic" state machines this would be the first direction I'd look. Macros (real ones, not cpp-kind) may also help a lot. Without a MOP the task may be (a lot?) more difficult. Whether it is possible (in a reasonable time frame, practically) or not I cannot say with confidence, not after a few minutes of sctratching my head. I suspect (again, *intuitively*) that one difficulty may be that the state machine might need to know something about the future capabilities at construction time. If you manage to specify a common interface to all the components and generate compliant implementations then maybe you can manipulate your state machine at the level of base/interface classes even in statically typed environments. Dynamic typing could help. Another serious difficulty would be generating implementations at runtime, but this difficulty seems practical rather than conceptual. I don't know how much it helps. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
