Formal Languages and Automata Theory
The downward closure of a word language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of any language is regular. While the downward closure appears to be a powerful…
Minimal deterministic finite automata (DFAs) can be reduced further at the expense of a finite number of errors. Recently, such minimization algorithms have been improved to run in time O(n log n), where n is the number of states of the…
A (left) quotient of a language $L$ by a word $w$ is the language $w^{-1}L=\{x\mid wx\in L\}$. The quotient complexity of a regular language $L$ is the number of quotients of $L$; it is equal to the state complexity of $L$, which is the…
To expand a fundamental theory of context-free languages, we equip nondeterministic one-way pushdown automata with additional oracle mechanisms, which naturally induce various nondeterministic reducibilities among formal languages. As a…
It has been shown recently (Shalygo, 2014) that stationary and dynamic patterns can arise in the proposed one-component model of the analog (continuous state) kinetic automaton, or kinon for short, defined as a reflexive dynamical system…
Model checking timed automata becomes increasingly complex with the increase in the number of clocks. Hence it is desirable that one constructs an automaton with the minimum number of clocks possible. The problem of checking whether there…
A distributed protocol is typically modeled as a set of communicating processes, where each process is described as an extended state machine along with fairness assumptions, and its correctness is specified using safety and liveness…
We introduce partially ordered two-way B\"uchi automata and characterize their expressive power in terms of fragments of first-order logic FO[<]. Partially ordered two-way B\"uchi automata are B\"uchi automata which can change the direction…
Simulations of weighted tree automata (wta) are considered. It is shown how such simulations can be decomposed into simpler functional and dual functional simulations also called forward and backward simulations. In addition, it is shown in…
We study one-head machines through symbolic and topological dynamics. In particular, a subshift is associated to the subshift, and we are interested in its complexity in terms of realtime recognition. We emphasize the class of one-head…
Visibly pushdown transducers form a subclass of pushdown transducers that (strictly) extends finite state transducers with a stack. Like visibly pushdown automata, the input symbols determine the stack operations. In this paper, we prove…
We study finite automata running over infinite binary trees. A run of such an automaton is usually said to be accepting if all its branches are accepting. In this article, we relax the notion of accepting run by allowing a certain quantity…
In this paper we study the state complexity of catenation combined with symmetric difference. First, an upper bound is computed using some combinatoric tools. Then, this bound is shown to be tight by giving a witness for it. Moreover, we…
A language L is prefix-closed if, whenever a word w is in L, then every prefix of w is also in L. We define suffix-, factor-, and subword-closed languages in the same way, where by subword we mean subsequence. We study the quotient…
We investigate the problem of the maximum number of cubic subwords (of the form $www$) in a given word. We also consider square subwords (of the form $ww$). The problem of the maximum number of squares in a word is not well understood.…
In this paper we study a subclass of pebble automata (PA) for data languages for which the emptiness problem is decidable. Namely, we introduce the so-called top view weak PA. Roughly speaking, top view weak PA are weak PA where the…
We prove that, unless $\mathrm{P}=\mathrm{NP}$, no polynomial algorithm can approximate the minimum length of \sws for a given \san within a constant factor.
We study a two-dimensional cellular automaton (CA), called Diffusion Rule (DR), which exhibits diffusion-like dynamics of propagating patterns. In computational experiments we discover a wide range of mobile and stationary localizations…
Hereditarily finite (HF) set theory provides a standard universe of sets, but with no infinite sets. Its utility is demonstrated through a formalisation of the theory of regular languages and finite automata, including the Myhill-Nerode…
We extend the existing enumeration of neck tie-knots to include tie-knots with a textured front, tied with the narrow end of a tie. These tie-knots have gained popularity in recent years, based on reconstructions of a costume detail from…