Amount of nonconstructivity in deterministic finite automata

2010

AbstractWhen D. Hilbert used nonconstructive methods in his famous paper on invariants (1888), P. Gordan tried to prevent the publication of this paper considering these methods as non-mathematical. L.E.J. Brouwer in the early twentieth century initiated intuitionist movement in mathematics. His slogan was “nonconstructive arguments have no value for mathematics”. However, P. Erdös got many exciting results in discrete mathematics by nonconstructive methods. It is widely believed that these results either cannot be proved by constructive methods or the proofs would have been prohibitively complicated. The author (Freivalds, 2008) [10] showed that nonconstructive methods in coding theory are…