Related papers: Can Nondeterminism Help Complementation?
We introduce a new measure on regular languages: their nondeterministic syntactic complexity. It is the least degree of any extension of the `canonical boolean representation' of the syntactic monoid. Equivalently, it is the least number of…
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…
We study a categorical generalisation of tree automata, as $\Sigma$-algebras for a fixed endofunctor $\Sigma$ endowed with initial and final states. Under mild assumptions about the base category, we present a general minimisation algorithm…
These lecture notes are intended as a supplement to Moore and Mertens' The Nature of Computation or as a standalone resource, and are available to anyone who wants to use them. Comments are welcome, and please let me know if you use these…
We study structural restrictions on biautomata such as, e.g., acyclicity, permutation-freeness, strongly permutation-freeness, and orderability, to mention a few. We compare the obtained language families with those induced by deterministic…
We introduce the category of dependency automata. A dependency automaton consists of two nondeterministic finite automata, with a relation between their states satisfying conditions. This category is equivalent to deterministic finite…
Let $NFA_b(q)$ denote the set of languages accepted by nondeterministic finite automata with $q$ states over an alphabet with $b$ letters. Let $B_n$ denote the set of words of length $n$. We give a quadratic lower bound on the VC dimension…
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…
While many applications of automata in formal methods can use nondeterministic automata, some applications, most notably synthesis, need deterministic or good-for-games (GFG) automata. The latter are nondeterministic automata that can…
Given a nondeterministic finite-state automaton (NFA), we aim to estimate the size of an equivalent deterministic finite-state automaton (DFA). We demonstrate that computing the state complexity of an NFA within polynomial precision is…
In the field of computational logic, two classes of finite automata are considered fundamental: deterministic and nondeterministic automata (DFAs and NFAs). In a more fine-grained approach three natural intermediate classes were introduced,…
Alternating parity automata (APAs) provide a robust formalism for modelling infinite behaviours and play a central role in formal verification. Despite their widespread use, the algebraic theory underlying APAs has remained largely…
Families of DFAs (FDFAs) provide an alternative formalism for recognizing $\omega$-regular languages. The motivation for introducing them was a desired correlation between the automaton states and right congruence relations, in a manner…
We present a few classes of synchronizing automata exhibiting certain extremal properties with regard to synchronization. The first is a series of automata with subsets whose shortest extending words are of length $\varTheta(n^2)$, where…
We show that a special case of the Feferman-Vaught composition theorem gives rise to a natural notion of automata for finite words over an infinite alphabet, with good closure and decidability properties, as well as several logical…
We present an efficient algorithm for checking language equivalence of states in top-down deterministic finite tree automata (DFTAs). Unlike string automata, tree automata operate over hierarchical structures, posing unique challenges for…
The emptiness and containment problems for probabilistic automata are natural quantitative generalisations of the classical language emptiness and inclusion problems for Boolean automata. It is well known that both problems are undecidable.…
The classic approaches to synthesize a reactive system from a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification first translate the given LTL formula to an equivalent omega-automaton and then compute a winning strategy for the corresponding…
This paper deals with the size complexity of minimal {\it two-way quantum finite automata} (2qfa's) necessary for operations to perform on all inputs of each fixed length. Such a complexity measure, known as state complexity of operations,…
We present a few results and several open problems concerning complete deterministic finite automata in which every non-empty subset of the state set occurs as the image of the whole state set under the action of a suitable input word.