The suffix automaton of abcbc: 8 states, 9 transitions

The suffix automaton of abcbc: 8 states, 9 transitions

The smallest deterministic machine accepting exactly the suffixes of abcbc. It has 8 states against a bound of 9 and 9 transitions against 11, and it recognises all 12 distinct substrings from any state reachable by reading them. The number in a state is the longest string that reaches it; the dashed arrows are suffix links.

Drawn at 700 × 208, wide on the page. Everything above is what automaton-map returns with no arguments; the caption is the generator's own, computed from the numbers in the drawing rather than written beside it.

5 essays call automaton-map. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the one its essay argues about — which is what optcheck and figfill exist to catch.