Related papers: A Note on Ordinal DFAs
It is known that an ordinal is the order type of the lexicographic ordering of a regular language if and only if it is less than omega^omega. We design a polynomial time algorithm that constructs, for each well-ordered regular language L…
We focus on formulae $\exists X.\, \varphi(\vec{Y}, X)$ of monadic second-order logic over the full binary tree, such that the witness $X$ is a well-founded set. The ordinal rank $\mathrm{rank}(X) < \omega_1$ of such a set $X$ measures its…
We consider context-free languages equipped with the lexicographic ordering. We show that when the lexicographic ordering of a context-free language is scattered, then its Hausdorff rank is less than $\omega^\omega$. As a corollary of this…
We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…
An algebraic tree T is one determined by a finite system of fixed point equations. The frontier \Fr(T) of an algebraic tree t is linearly ordered by the lexicographic order \lex. When (\Fr(T),\lex) is well-ordered, its order type is an…
The paper completely characterizes the primality of acyclic DFAs, where a DFA $\mathcal{A}$ is prime if there do not exist DFAs $\mathcal{A}_1,\dots,\mathcal{A}_t$ with $\mathcal{L}(\mathcal{A}) = \bigcap_{i=1}^{t}…
We show that the first-order logical theory of the binary overlap-free words (and, more generally, the ${\alpha}$-free words for rational ${\alpha}$, $2 < {\alpha} \leq 7/3$), is decidable. As a consequence, many results previously obtained…
We study the task, for a given language $L$, of enumerating the (generally infinite) sequence of its words, without repetitions, while bounding the delay between two consecutive words. To allow for delay bounds that do not depend on the…
We consider extensions of monadic second order logic over $\omega$-words, which are obtained by adding one language that is not $\omega$-regular. We show that if the added language $L$ has a neutral letter, then the resulting logic is…
In the present work, we tackle the regular language indexing problem by first studying the hierarchy of $p$-sortable languages: regular languages accepted by automata of width $p$. We show that the hierarchy is strict and does not collapse,…
A linear ordering is called context-free if it is the lexicographic ordering of some context-free language and is called scattered if it has no dense subordering. Each scattered ordering has an associated ordinal, called its rank. It is…
Co-lex partial orders were recently introduced in (Cotumaccio et al., SODA 2021 and JACM 2023) as a powerful tool to index finite state automata, with applications to regular expression matching. They generalize Wheeler orders (Gagie et…
Given a regular language L over an ordered alphabet $\Sigma$, the set of lexicographically smallest (resp., largest) words of each length is itself regular. Moreover, there exists an unambiguous finite-state transducer that, on a given word…
We show that if a context-free grammar generates a language whose lexicographic ordering is well-ordered of type less than $\omega^2$, then its order type is effectively computable.
We prove that the injectively omega-tree-automatic ordinals are the ordinals smaller than $\omega^{\omega^\omega}$. Then we show that the injectively $\omega^n$-automatic ordinals, where $n>0$ is an integer, are the ordinals smaller than…
The problem of k-minimisation for a DFA M is the computation of a smallest DFA N (where the size |M| of a DFA M is the size of the domain of the transition function) such that their recognized languages differ only on words of length less…
Let WO$(\omega^\omega)$ be the statement that the ordinal number $\omega^\omega$ is well ordered. WO$(\omega^\omega)$ has occurred several times in the reverse-mathematical literature. The purpose of this expository note is to discuss the…
The states of a deterministic finite automaton A can be identified with collections of words in Pf(L(A)) -- the set of prefixes of words belonging to the regular language accepted by A. But words can be ordered and among the many possible…
An algebraic linear ordering is a component of the initial solution of a first-order recursion scheme over the continuous categorical algebra of countable linear orderings equipped with the sum operation and the constant 1. Due to a general…
A word is called carefully synchronising for a partial deterministic finite semi-automaton if it maps all states to the same state. Equivalently, it is a composition of partial transformations equal to a constant total transformation. There…