Related papers: On $k$-piecewise testability (preliminary report)
A regular language $L$ is said to be prime, if it is not the product of two non-trivial languages. Martens et al. settled the exact complexity of deciding primality for deterministic finite automata in 2010. For finite languages, Mateescu…
The piecewise complexity $h(u)$ of a word is the minimal length of subwords needed to exactly characterise $u$. Its piecewise minimality index $\rho(u)$ is the smallest length $k$ such that $u$ is minimal among its order-$k$ class $[u]_k$…
In this paper we examine decision problems associated with various classes of convex languages, studied by Ang and Brzozowski (under the name "continuous languages"). We show that we can decide whether a given language L is prefix-,…
As far as I know, at the time that I originally devised this result (1998), this was the first constructive proof that, for any integer $k$, there is a language in $\Sigma_2^P$ that cannot be simulated by a family of logic circuits of size…
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…
Given a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ and a deterministic finite automaton on $\Sigma$, the problem of determining whether the language recognized by the automaton contains any pangram is \NP-complete. Various other language classes and problems…
The piecewise complexity $h(u)$ of a word is the minimal length of subwords needed to exactly characterise $u$. Its piecewise minimality index $\rho(u)$ is the smallest length $k$ such that $u$ is minimal among its order-$k$ class $[u]_k$…
The present paper presents and proves a proposition concerning the time complexity of finite languages. It is shown herein, that for any finite language (a language for which the set of words composing it is finite) there is a Turing…
Two languages are "finitely different" if their symmetric difference is finite. We consider the DFAs of finitely different regular languages and find major structural similarities. We proceed to consider the smallest DFAs that recognize a…
A language is dense if the set of all infixes (or subwords) of the language is the set of all words. Here, it is shown that it is decidable whether the language accepted by a nondeterministic Turing machine with a one-way read-only input…
We study the membership problem to context-free languages L (CFLs) on probabilistic words, that specify for each position a probability distribution on the letters (assuming independence across positions). Our task is to compute, given a…
We construct a hierarchy of regular languages such that the current language in the hierarchy can be accepted by 1-way quantum finite automata with a probability smaller than the corresponding probability for the preceding language in the…
Multi-letter {\it quantum finite automata} (QFAs) were a quantum variant of classical {\it one-way multi-head finite automata} (J. Hromkovi\v{c}, Acta Informatica 19 (1983) 377-384), and it has been shown that this new one-way QFAs…
We study a model where two opposing provers debate over the membership status of a given string in a language, trying to convince a weak verifier whose coins are visible to all. We show that the incorporation of just two qubits to an…
A classical result (often credited to Y. Medvedev) states that every language recognized by a finite automaton is the homomorphic image of a local language, over a much larger so-called local alphabet, namely the alphabet of the edges of…
For any fixed positive integer $k$, let $\alpha_{k}$ denote the smallest $\alpha \in (0,1)$ such that the random graph sequence $\left\{G\left(n, n^{-\alpha}\right)\right\}$ does not satisfy the zero-one law for the set $\mathcal{E}_{k}$ of…
A separator for two languages is a third language containing the first one and disjoint from the second one. We investigate the following decision problem: given two regular input languages, decide whether there exists a locally testable…
It is well known that computing a minimum DFA consistent with a given set of positive and negative examples is NP-hard. Previous work has identified conditions on the input sample under which the problem becomes tractable or remains hard.…
A locally testable semigroup S is a semigroup with the property that for some nonnegative integer k, called the order or level of local testability, two words u and v in some set of generators for semigroup S are equal in the semigroup if…
Two words $w_1$ and $w_2$ are said to be $k$-binomial equivalent if every non-empty word $x$ of length at most $k$ over the alphabet of $w_1$ and $w_2$ appears as a scattered factor of $w_1$ exactly as many times as it appears as a…