Post-war British comedy in which a soldier returns to his home village and the family tavern now at threat from an unscrupulous rival. When pub owner George Harper (George Formby) arrives back in Britain his first thought is to return to the village of Tumbleford and his pub, The Unicorn. Unfortunately for George, the manager of the village's other pub, The Lion, has taken advantage of his absence to steal his customers and even seems suspiciously close to George's childhood sweetheart, Mary (Rosalyn Boulter). Can George find a way to win back Mary and his customers?

This book introduces the reader to the notions, the techniques, and the theory of grammatical picture generation, a research field focusing on formal systems that describe sets of pictures by means of syntactic rules.

The book presents important types of picture generators, using a tree-based approach to stress their common algorithmic basis, the treatment influenced by the theory of computation, and the theory of formal languages in particular. It guides the reader through the basics of the tree-based approach on to dedicated chapters on line-drawing languages, collage grammars, iterated function systems, grid picture languages, languages of fractals, and languages of coloured collages, while presenting results about (un)decidable, NP-complete, or efficiently solvable problems, normal forms, hierarchies of language classes, and related phenomena.

In support, the book contains detailed exercises throughout, and the software on the enclosed CD allows the reader to experiment with the picture generators explained in the text. The book is of interest to researchers and graduate students in computer science and mathematics who are engaged with the theory and practice of picture-generating systems.

This book introduces the reader to the notions, the techniques, and the theory of grammatical picture generation, a research field focusing on formal systems that describe sets of pictures by means of syntactic rules. The book presents important types of picture generators, using a tree-based approach to stress their common algorithmic basis, the treatment influenced by the theory of computation, and the theory of formal languages in particular. It guides the reader through the basics of the tree-based approach on to dedicated chapters on line-drawing languages, collage grammars, iterated function systems, grid picture languages, languages of fractals, and languages of coloured collages, while presenting results about (un)decidable, NP-complete, or efficiently solvable problems, normal forms, hierarchies of language classes, and related phenomena. In support, the book contains detailed exercises throughout. The book is of interest to researchers and graduate students in computer science and mathematics who are engaged with the theory and practice of picture-generating systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Developments in Language Theory, DLT 2023, held in Umeå, Sweden, during June 12–16, 2023.  The 20 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 32 submissions (31 regular ones and one invited).The DLT conference series provides a forum for presenting current developments informal languages and automata. Its scope is very general and includes, among others, the following topics and areas: grammars, acceptors and transducers for words; trees and graphs; relations between formal languages and artificial neural networks; algebraic theories of automata; algorithmic, combinatorial, and algebraic properties of words and languages; variable length codes; symbolic dynamics; cellular automata; groups and semigroups generated by automata; polyominoes and multidimensional patterns; decidability questions; image manipulation and compression; efficient text algorithms; relationships to cryptography, concurrency, complexity theory, and logic; bio-inspired computing; and quantum computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2017, held in Umea, Sweden, in March 2017. The 31 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: algorithmic learning and semantics; automata and logics; combinatorics on words, compression, and pattern matching; complexity; finite automata; grammars, languages, and parsing; graphs and Petri Nets; non-classical automata; and pushdown automata and systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata, CIAA 2015, held in held in Umea, Sweden, in August 2015. The 22 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers and 2 toool demonstration papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. The papers cover all aspects of cover automata, counter automata, decision algorithms on automata, descriptional complexity, expressive power of automata, homing sequences, jumping finite automata, multi-dimensional languages, parsing and pattern matching, quantum automata, realtime pushdown automata, random generation of automata, regular expressions, security issues, sensors in automata, transducers, transformation of automata, and weighted automata.