Related papers: On $k$-piecewise testability (preliminary report)
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…
A positive integer $n$ is said to be $k$-layered if its divisors can be partitioned into $k$ sets with equal sum. In this paper, we start the systematic study of these class of numbers. In particular, we state some algorithms to find some…
Over finite words, languages of dot-depth one are expressively complete for alternation-free first-order logic. This fragment is also known as the Boolean closure of existential first-order logic. Here, the atomic formulas comprise order,…
We introduce a flexible class of well-quasi-orderings (WQOs) on words that generalizes the ordering of (not necessarily contiguous) subwords. Each such WQO induces a class of piecewise testable languages (PTLs) as Boolean combinations of…
A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] \dots w[i_{k}]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq \lvert w\rvert$. A word $w$ is $k$-subsequence universal over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if every…
The atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of the language. Tight upper bounds on the number of atoms of a language and on the quotient complexities of atoms are known. We…
We study expression learning problems with syntactic restrictions and introduce the class of finite-aspect checkable languages to characterize symbolic languages that admit decidable learning. The semantics of such languages can be defined…
Two languages are separable by a piecewise testable language if and only if there exists no infinite tower between them. An infinite tower is an infinite sequence of strings alternating between the two languages such that every string is a…
The downward closure of a language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of every language is regular. Moreover, recent results show that downward closures are…
We study the class of languages that have membership proofs which can be verified by real-time finite-state machines using only a constant number of random bits, regardless of the size of their inputs. Since any further restriction on the…
A deterministic finite automaton (DFA) is composite if its language can be decomposed into an intersection of languages of smaller DFAs. Otherwise, A is prime. This notion of primality was introduced by Kupferman and Mosheiff in 2013, 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…
It is an open problem to characterize the class of languages recognized by quantum finite automata (QFA). We examine some necessary and some sufficient conditions for a (regular) language to be recognizable by a QFA. For a subclass of…
The class of local languages is a well-known subclass of the regular languages that admits many equivalent characterizations. In this short note we establish the PSPACE-completeness of the problem of determining, given as input a…
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…
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}…
Consider a Henselian rank one valued field $K$ of equicharacteristic zero along with the language $\mathcal{L}^{P}$ of Denef--Pas. Let $f: A \to K$ be an $\mathcal{L}^{P}$-definable (with parameters) function on a subset $A$ of $K^{n}$. We…
In this paper we address the decision problem for a fragment of set theory with restricted quantification which extends the language studied in [4] with pair related quantifiers and constructs, in view of possible applications in the field…
A regular set of words is ($k$-)locally testable if membership of a word in the set is determined by the nature of its subwords of some bounded length $k$. In this article we study groups for which the set of all geodesic words with respect…
When can two regular word languages K and L be separated by a simple language? We investigate this question and consider separation by piecewise- and suffix-testable languages and variants thereof. We give characterizations of when two…