Related papers: DFAs and PFAs with Long Shortest Synchronizing Wor…
The separating words problem asks for the size of the smallest DFA needed to distinguish between two words of length <= n (by accepting one and rejecting the other). In this paper we survey what is known and unknown about the problem,…
In this note, we give a construction that provides a tight lower bound of mn-1 for the length of the shortest word in the intersection of two regular languages with state complexities m and n.
A deterministic finite automaton (DFA) separates two strings $w$ and $x$ if it accepts $w$ and rejects $x$. The minimum number of states required for a DFA to separate $w$ and $x$ is denoted by $sep(w,x)$. The present paper shows that the…
We show that any one-counter automaton with $n$ states, if its language is non-empty, accepts some word of length at most $O(n^2)$. This closes the gap between the previously known upper bound of $O(n^3)$ and lower bound of $\Omega(n^2)$.…
We answer two open questions by (Gruber, Holzer, Kutrib, 2009) on the state-complexity of representing sub- or superword closures of context-free grammars (CFGs): (1) We prove a (tight) upper bound of $2^{\mathcal{O}(n)}$ on the size of…
Given a DNF formula on n variables, the two natural size measures are the number of terms or size s(f), and the maximum width of a term w(f). It is folklore that short DNF formulas can be made narrow. We prove a converse, showing that…
We present several infinite series of synchronizing automata for which the minimum length of reset words is close to the square of the number of states. These automata are closely related to primitive digraphs with large exponent.
Given an order of the underlying alphabet we can lift it to the states of a finite deterministic automaton: to compare states we use the order of the strings reaching them. When the order on strings is the co-lexicographic one \emph{and}…
Several new algorithms for deciding emptiness of Boolean combinations of regular languages and of languages of alternating automata (AFA) have been proposed recently, especially in the context of analysing regular expressions and in string…
In this paper we define a new descriptional complexity measure for Deterministic Finite Automata, BC-complexity, as an alternative to the state complexity. We prove that for two DFAs with the same number of states BC-complexity can differ…
Starting with Aharoni and Linial in 1986, the deficiency delta(F) = c(F) - n(F) >= 1 for minimally unsatisfiable clause-sets F, the difference of the number of clauses and the number of variables, is playing an important role in…
The number of states and stack symbols needed to determinize nondeterministic input-driven pushdown automata (NIDPDA) working over a fixed alphabet is determined precisely. It is proved that in the worst case exactly 2^{n^2} states are…
We study the following natural variation on the classical universality problem: given a language $L(M)$ represented by $M$ (e.g., a DFA/RE/NFA/PDA), does there exist an integer $\ell \geq 0$ such that $\Sigma^\ell \subseteq L(M)$? In the…
We focus on infinite words with languages closed under reversal. If frequencies of all factors are well defined, we show that the number of different frequencies of factors of length n+1 does not exceed 2C(n+1)-2C(n)+1.
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…
A regular language is $k$-piecewise testable if it is a finite boolean combination of languages of the form $\Sigma^* a_1 \Sigma^* \cdots \Sigma^* a_n \Sigma^*$, where $a_i\in\Sigma$ and $0\le n \le k$. Given a DFA $A$ and $k\ge 0$, it is…
Imagine an assembly line where a box with a lid and liquid in it enters in some unknown orientation. The box should leave the line with the open lid facing upwards with the liquid still in it. To save costs there are no complex sensors or…
We revisit the popular \emph{delayed deterministic finite automaton} (\ddfa{}) compression algorithm introduced by Kumar~et~al.~[SIGCOMM 2006] for compressing deterministic finite automata (DFAs) used in intrusion detection systems. This…
We show that the number of all maximal $\alpha$-gapped repeats and palindromes of a word of length $n$ is at most $3(\pi^2/6 + 5/2) \alpha n$ and $7 (\pi^2 / 6 + 1/2) \alpha n - 5 n - 1$, respectively.
We are interested in the maximal number of distinct squares in a word. This problem was introduced by Fraenkel and Simpson, who presented a bound of 2n for a word of length n, and conjectured that the bound was less than n. Being that the…