Related papers: On the Gap Between Separating Words and Separating…
The dot-depth hierarchy of Brzozowski and Cohen classifies the star-free languages of finite words. By a theorem of McNaughton and Papert, these are also the first-order definable languages. The dot-depth rose to prominence following the…
A double occurrence word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ is a word in which each alphabet letter appears exactly twice. Such words arise naturally in the study of topology, graph theory, and combinatorics. Recently, double occurrence…
We investigate the descriptional complexity of different variants of 1-limited automata (1-las), an extension of two-way finite automata (2nfas) characterizing regular languages. In particular, we consider 2nfas with common-guess…
The relationship between the length of a word and the maximum length of its unbordered factors is investigated in this paper. Consider a finite word w of length n. We call a word bordered, if it has a proper prefix which is also a suffix of…
Given a permutation pi, the application of prefix reversal f^(i) to pi reverses the order of the first i elements of pi. The problem of Sorting By Prefix Reversals (also known as pancake flipping), made famous by Gates and Papadimitriou…
We study alternating register automata on data words and data trees in relation to logics. A data word (resp. data tree) is a word (resp. tree) whose every position carries a label from a finite alphabet and a data value from an infinite…
A tower is a sequence of words alternating between two languages in such a way that every word is a subsequence of the following word. The height of the tower is the number of words in the sequence. If there is no infinite tower (a tower of…
The question if a deterministic finite automaton admits a software reset in the form of a so-called synchronizing word can be answered in polynomial time. In this paper, we extend this algorithmic question to deterministic automata beyond…
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…
A deterministic finite automaton is said to be synchronizing if it has a reset word, i.e. a word that brings all states of the automaton to a particular one. We prove that it is a PSPACE-complete problem to check whether the language of…
In this paper, we introduce rerailing automata for $\omega$-regular languages. They generalize both deterministic parity (DPW) and minimized history-deterministic co-B\"uchi automata (with transition based acceptance, HdTbcBW) while…
A three-way (resp., two-way) two-dimensional automaton has a read-only input head that moves in three (resp., two) directions on a finite array of cells labelled by symbols of the input alphabet. Restricting the input head movement of a…
A square is a word of the form $xx$ for a non-empty word $x$. Brlek and Li [Comb. Theory, 2025] proved that the number of distinct squares in a word $w$ of length $n$ is at most $n - \sigma$, where $\sigma$ is the number of letters used in…
The work presents some new algorithms realized recently in the package TESTAS. They decide whether or not deterministic finite automaton (DFA) is synchronizing, several procedures find relatively short synchronizing words and a…
Weighted automata (WA) are an important formalism to describe quantitative properties. Obtaining equivalent deterministic machines is a longstanding research problem. In this paper we consider WA with a set semantics, meaning that the…
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…
Recently, a new paradigm was introduced in automata theory. The main idea is to classify regular languages according to their propensity to be sorted, establishing a deep connection between automata theory and data compression [J. ACM…
Word $W$ is said to encounter word $V$ provided there is a homomorphism $\phi$ mapping letters to nonempty words so that $\phi(V)$ is a substring of $W$. For example, taking $\phi$ such that $\phi(h)=c$ and $\phi(u)=ien$, we see that…
In combinatorics on words, a word $w$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is said to avoid a pattern $p$ over an alphabet $\Delta$ of variables if there is no factor $f$ of $w$ such that $f=h(p)$ where $h:\Delta^*\to\Sigma^*$ is a non-erasing…
Bernard Lang defines parsing as the calculation of the intersection of a FSA (the input) and a CFG. Viewing the input for parsing as a FSA rather than as a string combines well with some approaches in speech understanding systems, in which…