Related papers: Unrestricted State Complexity of Binary Operations…
A language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is prefix-convex if, for any words $x,y,z\in\Sigma^*$, whenever $x$ and $xyz$ are in $L$, then so is $xy$. Prefix-convex languages include right-ideal, prefix-closed, and prefix-free languages. We…
Given a regular language $L$, we study the language of words $\mathsf{D}(L)$, that distinguish between pairs of different left-quotients of $L$. We characterize this distinguishability operation, show that its iteration has always a fixed…
We survey recent results concerning the complexity of regular languages represented by their minimal deterministic finite automata. In addition to the quotient complexity of the language -- which is the number of its (left) quotients, and…
We solve two open problems concerning syntactic complexity: We prove that the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of a left ideal or a suffix-closed language with $n$ left quotients (that is, with state complexity $n$) is at most…
We introduce a subclass of the commutative regular languages that is characterized by the property that the state set of the minimal deterministic automaton can be written as a certain Cartesian product. This class behaves much better with…
Most slowly synchronizing automata over binary alphabets are circular, i.e., containing a letter permuting the states in a single cycle, and their set of synchronizing words has maximal state complexity, which also implies complete…
The state complexity, respectively, nondeterministic state complexity of a regular language $L$ is the number of states of the minimal deterministic, respectively, of a minimal nondeterministic finite automaton for $L$. Some of the most…
A language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is suffix-convex if, for any words $x,y,z\in\Sigma^*$, whenever $z$ and $xyz$ are in $L$, then so is $yz$. Suffix-convex languages include three special cases: left-ideal, suffix-closed, and…
In this work we construct an automaton for the commutative closure of a given regular group language. The number of states of the resulting automaton is bounded by the number of states of the original automaton, raised to the power of the…
Descriptional complexity is the study of the conciseness of the various models representing formal languages. The state complexity of a regular language is the size, measured by the number of states of the smallest, either deterministic or…
In this paper we consider the state complexity of an operation on formal languages, root(L). This naturally entails the discussion of the monoid of transformations of a finite set. We obtain good upper and lower bounds on the state…
We examine deterministic and nondeterministic state complexities of regular operations on prefix-free languages. We strengthen several results by providing witness languages over smaller alphabets, usually as small as possible. We next…
We study the state complexity of boolean operations and product (concatenation, catenation) combined with star. We derive tight upper bounds for the symmetric differences and differences of two languages, one or both of which are starred,…
Previously, self-verifying symmetric difference automata were defined and a tight bound of 2^n-1-1 was shown for state complexity in the unary case. We now consider the non-unary case and show that, for every n at least 2, there is a…
A language $L$ is the orthogonal catenation of languages $L_1$ and $L_2$ if every word of $L$ can be written in a unique way as a catenation of a word in $L_1$ and a word in $L_2$. We establish a tight bound for the state complexity of…
In a simple pattern matching problem one has a pattern $w$ and a text $t$, which are words over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$. One may ask whether $w$ occurs in $t$, and if so, where? More generally, we may have a set $P$ of patterns and a set…
We relate two measures of complexity of regular languages. The first is syntactic complexity, that is, the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of the language. That semigroup is isomorphic to the semigroup of transformations of states…
The tight upper bound on the state complexity of the reverse of R-trivial and J-trivial regular languages of the state complexity n is 2^{n-1}. The witness is ternary for R-trivial regular languages and (n-1)-ary for J-trivial regular…
In this paper we consider block languages, namely sets of words having the same length, and study the deterministic and nondeterministic state complexity of several operations on these languages. Being a subclass of finite languages, the…
A language L is prefix-free if, whenever words u and v are in L and u is a prefix of v, then u=v. Suffix-, factor-, and subword-free languages are defined similarly, where "subword" means "subsequence". A language is bifix-free if it is…