ABSTRACT
An important topic in theoretical Computer Science is the study of which problems can be solved by machines such as automata or Turing Machines which arise as abstractions of "real-life" computers. As we saw in Example 1.2.16, automata are in fact multi-based algebras, and so we can think of them as "algebraic machines." The most important automata are those in which the set of states is finite, and we consider finite automata or finite state machines; these model the realistic situation of a computer with a finite amount of memory and other resources.
