Another project we had during my first Winter quarter at Rose-Hulman was to use a finite state machine to colorize / perform syntax highlighting on Java source code. It’s easy enough as there are really 3 special cases that we are looking for (strings, comments, and keywords) and we only need 9 states to recognize them all (at least in my implementation).
This is work from my first Winter quarter at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Basically, we were to use Markov chains to generate a semi-random text that statistically matches an input text. The short version is that you calculate for each sequence of words of a given length (the chain length) what the possible next words are from the given text, each with a given probability. Then you use that to generate a new text, randomly choosing each new word from the aforementioned probabilities. It’s really fun to play with and I’ve got a half dozen or so examples to show you.