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Intuitively, a child is memory-limited if her conjectures arise from the interaction of the current input sentence with the latest grammar that she has formulated and stored. This grammar, of course, may provide information about all the sentences seen to date.
To illustrate, Ffinite — defined in 3.9a — is memory-limited. To see this, suppose that 0046-001.gif and 0046-002.gif. These equalities imply that 0046-003.gif so 0046-004.gif. In view of Proposition 3.15, this proves:
3.33 Proposition Ffinite is memory-limited, and hence some memory limited scientist identifies Image-0501.gif.
The foregoing example shows that memory limitation is not uniformly fatal, even for nontrivial problems. Nonetheless, memory limitation places genuine restrictions on the identifiable collections of languages, as shown by the next proposition.
3.34 Proposition There is an identifiable collection of languages that is not identified by any memory-limited scientist.
Proof: As a witness to the proposition, let 0046-005.gif consist of the language 0046-006.gif along with, for each 0046-007.gif, both the languages:
0046-008.gif.
It is easy to verify that Image-0502.gif is identifiable. On the other hand, suppose that memory-limited scientist F identifies L. We will show that F does not identify 0046-009.gif. By Corollary 3.25, let  s  be a locking sequence for F on L. Choose 0046-010.gif such that 0046-011.gif. Because 0046-012.gif, we have:
3.35 0046-013.gif.
Let:
0046-014.gif.
0046-015.gif.
Then 0046-016.gif by 3.35, and 0046-017.gif. So, since F is memory-limited, 0046-018.gif. Now let S be a text obtained by omitting all instances of 0046-019.gif from a given text for L. Define:
0046-020.gif.
0046-021.gif.

 
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