Related papers: The State Complexity of Lexicographically Smallest…
This paper establishes a lower bound on the number of states necessary in the worst case to simulate an $n$-state two-way nondeterministic finite automaton (2NFA) by a one-way unambiguous finite automaton (UFA). It is proved that for every…
An index for a finite automaton is a powerful data structure that supports locating paths labeled with a query pattern, thus solving pattern matching on the underlying regular language. In this paper, we solve the long-standing problem of…
Unambiguous non-deterministic finite automata have intermediate expressive power and succinctness between deterministic and non-deterministic automata. It has been conjectured that every unambiguous non-deterministic one-way finite…
We consider two natural problems about nondeterministic finite automata. First, given such an automaton M of n states, and a length l, does M accept a word of length l? We show that the classic problem of triangle-free graph recognition…
We consider some questions about formal languages that arise when inverses of letters, words and languages are defined. The reduced representation of a language over the free monoid is its unique equivalent representation in the free group.…
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 suffix-convex if for any words u, v,w, whenever w and uvw are in L, vw is in L as well. Suffix-convex languages include left ideals, suffix-closed languages, and suffix-free languages, which were studied previously. In this…
A finite deterministic (semi)automaton $\mathcal{A} =(Q,\Sigma,\delta)$ is $k$-compressible if there is some word $w\in \Sigma^+$ such that the image of its state set $Q$ under the natural action of $w$ is reduced by at least $k$ states.…
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…
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…
Piecewise testable languages are a subclass of the regular languages. There are many equivalent ways of defining them; Simon's congruence $\sim_k$ is one of the most classical approaches. Two words are $\sim_k$-equivalent if they have the…
Analogous to regular string and tree languages, regular languages of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are defined in the literature. Although called regular, those DAG-languages are more powerful and, consequently, standard problems have a…
The symbolic complexity of an infinite word $W$ is the function $p_W(l)$ counting the number of different subwords in $W$ of length $l$. In this paper our main purpose is to study the complexity for a class of topological dynamical systems,…
A word is called carefully synchronising for a partial deterministic finite semi-automaton if it maps all states to the same state. Equivalently, it is a composition of partial transformations equal to a constant total transformation. There…
An L-system (for lossless compression) is a CPD0L-system extended with two parameters $d$ and $n$, which determines unambiguously a string $w = \tau(\varphi^d(s))[1:n]$, where $\varphi$ is the morphism of the system, $s$ is its axiom, and…
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}…
Minimizing finite automata, proving trace equivalence of labelled transition systems or representing sofic subshifts involve very similar arguments, which suggests the possibility of a unified formalism. We propose finite states…
We consider a sliding window $W$ over a stream of characters from some alphabet of constant size. The user wants to perform deterministic substring matching on the current sliding window content and obtain positions of the matches. We…
It is proved that every regular expression of alphabetic width $n$, that is, with $n$ occurrences of symbols of the alphabet, can be transformed into a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) with $2^{\frac{n}{2}+(\frac{\log_2…
Let A be a finite alphabet and let L contained in (A*)^n be an n-variable language over A. We say that L is regular if it is the language accepted by a synchronous n-tape finite state automaton, it is quasi-regular if it is accepted by an…