ABSTRACT
The problem of finding the minimal DFA equivalent to a given automaton can be traced back to the 1950s with the works of Huffman (1954, 1955) and Moore (1956). Having applications on compiler construction, pattern matching, hardware circuit minimization, and XML processing to name a few, over the years several alternative (and increasingly efficient) algorithms have been proposed. Although they all depend upon computing an equivalence relation on the set of states, several approaches are possible: explicitly computing the equivalence relation, computing the partition (of states) that it induces, or computing the complement of the equivalence relation (finding all pairs of distinguishable states).
