Related papers: The Magic Number Problem for Subregular Language F…
In formal languages and automata theory, the magic number problem can be formulated as follows: for a given integer n, is it possible to find a number d in the range [n,2^n] such that there is no minimal deterministic finite automaton with…
This paper establishes a lower bound on the number of states necessary in the worst case to simulate an $n$-state two-way nondeterministic finite automaton (2NFA) by a one-way unambiguous finite automaton (UFA). It is proved that for every…
It is proved that every regular expression of alphabetic width $n$, that is, with $n$ occurrences of symbols of the alphabet, can be transformed into a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) with $2^{\frac{n}{2}+(\frac{\log_2…
We construct a probabilistic finite automaton (PFA) with 7 states and an input alphabet of 5 symbols for which the PFA Emptiness Problem is undecidable. The only input for the decision problem is the starting distribution. For the proof, we…
The ambiguity of a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) N for input size n is the maximal number of accepting computations of N for an input of size n. For all k, r 2 N we construct languages Lr,k which can be recognized by NFA's with…
This paper studies the complexity of operations on finite automata and the complexity of their decision problems when the alphabet is unary. Let $n$ denote the maximum of the number of states of the input finite automata considered in the…
Given an order of the underlying alphabet we can lift it to the states of a finite deterministic automaton: to compare states we use the order of the strings reaching them. When the order on strings is the co-lexicographic one \emph{and}…
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…
Unambiguous non-deterministic finite automata have intermediate expressive power and succinctness between deterministic and non-deterministic automata. It has been conjectured that every unambiguous non-deterministic one-way finite…
Families of DFAs (FDFAs) have recently been introduced as a new representation of $\omega$-regular languages. They target ultimately periodic words, with acceptors revolving around accepting some representation $u\cdot v^\omega$. Three…
Finite automata (FA) are a fundamental computational abstraction that is widely used in practice for various tasks in computer science, linguistics, biology, electrical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Given an input word, an FA…
We use results from communication complexity, both new and old ones, to prove lower bounds for unambiguous finite automata (UFAs). We show three results. $\textit{Complement:}$ There is a language $L$ recognised by an $n$-state UFA such…
The concept of Deterministic Finite Cover Automata (DFCA) was introduced at WIA '98, as a more compact representation than Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) for finite languages. In some cases representing a finite language,…
Analogous to regular string and tree languages, regular languages of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are defined in the literature. Although called regular, those DAG-languages are more powerful and, consequently, standard problems have a…
The infimal prefix-closed, controllable and observable superlanguage plays an essential role in the relationship between controllability, observability and co-observability -- the central notions of supervisory control theory. Existing…
We discuss the problem of learning a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) from a confidence oracle. That is, we are given access to an oracle $Q$ with incomplete knowledge of some target language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$; the oracle…
The nondeterministic quantum finite automaton (NQFA) is the only known case where a one-way quantum finite automaton (QFA) model has been shown to be strictly superior in terms of language recognition power to its probabilistic counterpart.…
We examine the NFA minimization problem in terms of atomic NFA's, that is, NFA's in which the right language of every state is a union of atoms, where the atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and…
We present a language $L_n$ which is recognizable by a probabilistic finite automaton (PFA) with probability $1 - \epsilon$ for all $\epsilon > 0$ with $O(log^2n)$ states, with a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) with O(n) states, but a…
While finite automata have minimal DFAs as a simple and natural normal form, deterministic omega-automata do not currently have anything similar. One reason for this is that a normal form for omega-regular languages has to speak about more…