Related papers: Complexity of a Problem Concerning Reset Words for…
We improve the best known upper bound on the length of the shortest reset words of synchronizing automata. The new bound is slightly better than $114 n^3 / 685 + O(n^2)$. The \v{C}ern\'y conjecture states that $(n-1)^2$ is an upper bound.…
We investigate the worst-case state complexity of reversals of deterministic finite automata with output (DFAOs). In these automata, each state is assigned some output value, rather than simply being labelled final or non-final. This…
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…
The notion of an automaton over a changing alphabet $X=(X_i)_{i\geq 1}$ is used to define and study automorphism groups of the tree $X^*$ of finite words over $X$. The concept of bi-reversibility for Mealy-type automata is extended to…
Given a countable set X (usually taken to be N or Z), an infinite permutation $\pi$ of X is a linear ordering $<_\pi$ of X. This paper investigates the combinatorial complexity of infinite permutations on N associated with the image of…
A complete deterministic finite automaton 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 is called completely reachable. We characterize completely…
In coding and information theory, it is desirable to construct maximal codes that can be either variable length codes or error control codes of fixed length. However deciding code maximality boils down to deciding whether a given NFA is…
A new technique is presented to prove non-termination of term rewriting. The basic idea is to find a non-empty regular language of terms that is closed under rewriting and does not contain normal forms. It is automated by representing the…
For any synchronizing $n$-state deterministic automaton, \v{C}ern\'{y} conjectures the existence of a synchronizing word of length at most $(n-1)^2$. We prove that there exists a synchronizing word of length at most $2n^2 - 7n + 7$ for…
Regular expressions with backreferences (regex, for short), as supported by most modern libraries for regular expression matching, have an NP-complete matching problem. We define a complexity parameter of regex, called active variable…
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.
An automaton is synchronizing if there is a word that maps all states onto the same state. \v{C}ern\'{y}'s conjecture on the length of the shortest such word is probably the most famous open problem in automata theory. We consider the…
The value 1 problem is a decision problem for probabilistic automata over finite words: given a probabilistic automaton, are there words accepted with probability arbitrarily close to 1? This problem was proved undecidable recently; to…
A regular language $L$ is union-free if it can be represented by a regular expression without the union operation. A union-free language is deterministic if it can be accepted by a deterministic one-cycle-free-path finite automaton; this is…
We show that for any two distinct words $ s_1, s_2 $ over an arbitrary alphabets, there exists a deterministic finite automaton with $ O(\log^2 n) $ states that accepts $ s_1 $ and rejects $ s_2 $. This improves the previous upper bound of…
We prove that language equivalence of deterministic one-counter automata is NL-complete. This improves the superpolynomial time complexity upper bound shown by Valiant and Paterson in 1975. Our main contribution is to prove that two…
A nondeterministic automaton is semantically deterministic (SD) if different nondeterministic choices in the automaton lead to equivalent states. Semantic determinism is interesting as it is a natural relaxation of determinism, and as some…
We show that the problem of finding a Resolution refutation that is at most polynomially longer than a shortest one is NP-hard. In the parlance of proof complexity, Resolution is not automatizable unless P = NP. Indeed, we show it is…
We approach the task of computing a carefully synchronizing word of optimum length for a given partial deterministic automaton, encoding the problem as an instance of SAT and invoking a SAT solver. Our experiments demonstrate that this…
Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) is a prominent specification formalism for real-time systems. In this paper, we show that the satisfiability problem for MTL over finite timed words is decidable, with non-primitive recursive complexity. We also…