English

Completeness for categories of generalized automata

Category Theory 2025-05-19 v1 Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

We present a slick proof of completeness and cocompleteness for categories of FF-automata, where the span of maps EEIOE\leftarrow E\otimes I \to O that usually defines a deterministic automaton of input II and output OO in a monoidal category (K,)(\mathcal K,\otimes) is replaced by a span EFEOE\leftarrow F E \to O for a generic endofunctor F:KKF : \mathcal K\to \mathcal K of a generic category K\mathcal K: these automata exist in their `Mealy' and `Moore' version and form categories F-MlyF\text{-}\mathsf{Mly} and F-MreF\text{-}\mathsf{Mre}; such categories can be presented as strict 2-pullbacks in Cat\mathsf{Cat} and whenever FF is a left adjoint, both F-MlyF\text{-}\mathsf{Mly} and F-MreF\text{-}\mathsf{Mre} admit all limits and colimits that K\mathcal K admits. We mechanize some of of our main results using the proof assistant Agda and the library `agda-categories`.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2303.03867,
  title  = {Completeness for categories of generalized automata},
  author = {Guido Boccali and Andrea Laretto and Fosco Loregian and Stefano Luneia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.03867},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T09:05:27.495Z