What is the Pumping Lemma in Layman's terms?

Question

I saw this question, and was curious as to what the pumping lemma was (Wikipedia didn\'t help much).

I understand that it\'s basically a theoretical p

Answer 1

In laymans terms, I think you have it almost right. It's a proof technique (two actually) for proving that a language is NOT in a certain class.

Fer example, consider a regular language (regexp, automata, etc) with an infinite number of strings in it. At a certain point, as starblue said, you run out of memory because the string is too long for the automaton. This means that there has to be a chunk of the string that the automaton can't tell how many copies of it you have (you're in a loop). So, any number of copies of that substring in the middle of the string, and you still are in the language.

This means that if you have a language that does NOT have this property, ie, there is a sufficiently long string with NO substring that you can repeat any number of times and still be in the language, then the language isn't regular.

Answer 2

Basically, you have a definition of a language (like XML), which is a way to tell whether a given string of characters (a "word") is a member of that language or not.

The pumping lemma establishes a method by which you can pick a "word" from the language, and then apply some changes to it. The theorem states that if the language is regular, these changes should yield a "word" that is still from the same language. If the word you come up with isn't in the language, then the language could not have been regular in the first place.

Answer 3

By definition regular languages are those recognized by a finite state automaton. Think of it as a labyrinth : states are rooms, transitions are one-way corridors between rooms, there's an initial room, and an exit (final) room. As the name 'finite state automaton' says, there is a finite number of rooms. Each time you travel along a corridor, you jot down the letter written on its wall. A word can be recognized if you can find a path from the initial to the final room, going through corridors labelled with its letters, in the correct order.

The pumping lemma says that there is a maximum length (the pumping length) for which you can wander through the labyrinth without ever going back to a room through which you have gone before. The idea is that since there are only so many distinct rooms you can walk in, past a certain point, you have to either exit the labyrinth or cross over your tracks. If you manage to walk a longer path than this pumping length in the labyrinth, then you are taking a detour : you are inserting a(t least one) cycle in your path that could be removed (if you want your crossing of the labyrinth to recognize a smaller word) or repeated (pumped) indefinitely (allowing to recognize a super-long word).

There is a similar lemma for context-free languages. Those languages can be represented as word accepted by pushdown automata, which are finite state automata that can make use of a stack to decide which transitions to perform. Nonetheless, since there is stilla finite number of states, the intuition explained above carries over, even through the formal expression of the property may be slightly more complex.