... monologue in the field of automata theory. In this thesis we present two new transformation operations on finite state automata, called stretching and jamming. These transformations are intended to increase the performance of the automata. Readers who are mainly interested in the theoretical side of the transformations are referred to chapters 2 and 3. An overview of the abstract algorithms that model the transfor-mations is given in chapters 4 and 5. Implementation details can be found in chapter 6. If the reader is interested in the practical results, and wants to know in which cases stretching and jamming are useful, we refer to chapter 7
