I'm having issues 'describing each step' when creating an NFA from a regular expression. The question is as follows:
Convert the following regular expression to a non-deterministic finite-state automaton (NFA), clearly describing the steps of the algorithm that you use: (b|a)*b(a|b)
I've made a simple 3-state machine but it's very much from intuition. This is a question from a past exam written by my lecturer, who also wrote the following explanation of Thompson's algorithm: http://www.cs.may.ie/staff/jpower/Courses/Previous/parsing/node5.html
Can anyone clear up how to 'describe each step clearly'? It just seems like a set of basic rules rather than an algorithm with steps to follow.
Maybe there's an algorithm I've glossed over somewhere but so far I've just created them with an educated guess.