teachmeqmc

This package contains an implementation of the Quine-McCluskey algorithm and serves to educational purposes.

Its main goal is to produce a LaTeX document with detailed description of the performing of the Quine-McCluskey algorithm for a given input; the input is represented by a complete Disjunctive Normal Form (shortly DNF) which may contain duplicate minterms.

The motivation to write this program was to provide university students with automatically generated examples for better understanding the Quine-McCluskey algorithm and, furthermore, to randomly generate examen tests on this subject together with their detailed solutions to make the corrections of the tests easier.

Installation

Install the package from PyPI utilizing the pip module:

python -m pip install teachmeqmc

Example

A simple program using this package may look like this:

    from teachmeqmc import BooleanFunction

    f = BooleanFunction(4)
    f.addTerm((0, 0, 0, 0))
    f.addTerm((0, 0, 0, 1))
    f.addTerm((0, 0, 1, 0))
    f.addTerm((0, 0, 1, 1))
    f.addTerm((0, 1, 0, 0))
    f.addTerm((1, 1, 0, 0))
    f.addTerm((1, 1, 0, 1))
    f.addTerm((1, 0, 0, 1))
    f.addTerm((1, 0, 0, 1))

    f.performQuineMcCluskey()

    f.show()
    f.saveToTextFile("output.txt")
    f.saveToLaTeXFile("output.tex")

The program first imports the class BooleanFunction. Then it creates a new instance f of the class BooleanFunction which represents a Boolean function (a mapping from {0,1}^n to {0,1}) defined by its complete DNF. The parameter 4 gives the number of the inputs of the Boolean function.

Further, by calling the method addTerm it is defined by which minterms the complete DNF of the Boolean function is given; for example f.addTerm((0, 0, 1, 0)) states that the minterm a'b'cd' shall be a part of the defining complete DNF. Observe that the last two minterms are identical. However, both will be part of the defining complete DNF and in the output report it will be visualised that one of these terms has to be removed.

Then the Quine-McCluskey algorithm is performed; this method does not return anything, instead, it stores the result of the procedure to the attributes of BooleanFunction.

Finally, calling show prints the report on the processing of the Quine-McCluskey algorithm to the terminal output, calling saveToTextFile saves it to a plain text file, and calling saveToLaTeXFile saves it to a LaTeX file which can be further compiled to a PDF file e.g. by pdflatex.

Remark that also single parts of the report may be obtained. For such an output, see the methods of the class BooleanFunction in the form export...ToLaTeX and export...ToText.