Related papers: Alternating Towers and Piecewise Testable Separato…
We study the definability of maximal towers and of inextendible linearly ordered towers (ilt's), a notion that is more general than that of a maximal tower. We show that there is, in the constructible universe, a $\Pi^1_1$ definable maximal…
The following problem is shown undecidable: given regular languages L,K of finite trees, decide if there exists a deterministic tree-walking automaton which accepts all trees in L and rejects all trees in K. The proof uses a technique of…
A locally threshold testable language L is a language with the property that for some non negative integers k and l, whether or not a word u is in the language L depends on (1) the prefix and suffix of the word u of length k > 1 and (2) the…
We consider the problem of computing the measure of a regular set of infinite binary trees. While the general case remains unsolved, we show that the measure of a language can be computed when the set is given in one of the following three…
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
A data tree is an unranked ordered tree whose every node is labelled by a letter from a finite alphabet and an element ("datum") from an infinite set, where the latter can only be compared for equality. The article considers alternating…
This work addresses the problem of computing measures of recognisable sets of infinite trees. An algorithm is provided to compute the probability measure of a tree language recognisable by a weak alternating automaton, or equivalently…
Consider a non-standard numeration system like the one built over the Fibonacci sequence where nonnegative integers are represented by words over $\{0,1\}$ without two consecutive 1. Given a set $X$ of integers such that the language of…
We consider the length of the longest word definable in FO and MSO via a formula of size n. For both logics we obtain as an upper bound for this number an exponential tower of height linear in n. We prove this by counting types with respect…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
A set X of partial words over a finite alphabet A is called unavoidable if every two-sided infinite word over A has a factor compatible with an element of X. Unlike the case of a set of words without holes, the problem of deciding whether…
Concatenation hierarchies are classifications of regular languages. All such hierarchies are built through the same construction process: start from an initial class of languages and build new levels using two generic operations.…
We investigate the quantifier alternation hierarchy in first-order logic on finite words. Levels in this hierarchy are defined by counting the number of quantifier alternations in formulas. We prove that one can decide membership of a…
We investigate a famous decision problem in automata theory: separation. Given a class of language C, the separation problem for C takes as input two regular languages and asks whether there exists a third one which belongs to C, includes…
We study modal separability for fixpoint formulae: given two mutually exclusive fixpoint formulae $\varphi,\varphi'$, decide whether there is a modal formula $\psi$ that separates them, that is, that satisfies…
We consider the computability and complexity of decision questions for Probabilistic Finite Automata (PFA) with sub-exponential ambiguity. We show that the emptiness problem for strict and non-strict cut-points of polynomially ambiguous…
Nondeterministic weighted automata are finite automata with numerical weights on transitions. They define quantitative languages L that assign to each word w a real number L(w). The value of an infinite word w is computed as the maximal…
We investigate the scattered palindromic subwords in a finite word. We start by characterizing the words with the least number of scattered palindromic subwords. Then, we give an upper bound for the total number of palindromic subwords in a…
We introduce in this section an Algebraic and Combinatorial approach to the theory of Numbers. The approach rests on the observation that numbers can be identified with familiar combinatorial objects namely rooted trees, which we shall here…
A lower bound on the amount of noise that must be added to a GHZ-like entangled state to make it separable (also called the random robustness) is found using the transposition condition. The bound is applicable to arbitrary numbers of…