Deciding minimal distinguishing DFAs is NP-complete
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
2023-06-07 v1
Abstract
In this paper, we present a proof of the NP-completeness of computing the smallest Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) that distinguishes two given regular languages as DFAs. A distinguishing DFA is an automaton that recognizes a language which is a subset of exactly one of the given languages. We establish the NP-hardness of this decision problem by providing a reduction from the Boolean Satisfiability Problem (SAT) to deciding the existence of a distinguishing automaton of a specific size.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2306.03533,
title = {Deciding minimal distinguishing DFAs is NP-complete},
author = {Jan Martens},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03533},
year = {2023}
}