Related papers: State Complexity of Projection on Languages Recogn…
Given a subset of states $S$ of a deterministic finite automaton and a word $w$, the preimage is the subset of all states mapped to a state in $S$ by the action of $w$. We study three natural problems concerning words giving certain…
We generalize the concept of synchronizing words for finite automata, which map all states of the automata to the same state, to deterministic visibly push-down automata. Here, a synchronizing word w does not only map all states to the same…
We study structural restrictions on biautomata such as, e.g., acyclicity, permutation-freeness, strongly permutation-freeness, and orderability, to mention a few. We compare the obtained language families with those induced by deterministic…
Shuffle projection is motivated by the verification of safety properties of special parameterized systems. Basic definitions and properties, especially related to alphabetic homomorphisms, are presented. The relation between iterated…
A two-dimensional finite automaton has a read-only input head that moves in four directions on a finite array of cells labelled by symbols of the input alphabet. A three-way two-dimensional automaton is prohibited from making upward moves,…
A two-way deterministic finite state automaton with one counter (2D1CA) is a fundamental computational model that has been examined in many different aspects since sixties, but we know little about its power in the case of unary languages.…
Reversible forms of computations are often interesting from an energy efficiency point of view. When the computation device in question is an automaton, it is known that the minimal reversible automaton recognizing a given language is not…
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…
This paper studies the complexity of languages of finite words using automata theory. To go beyond the class of regular languages, we consider infinite automata and the notion of state complexity defined by Karp. Motivated by the seminal…
Probabilistic automata are an extension of nondeterministic finite automata in which transitions are annotated with probabilities. Despite its simplicity, this model is very expressive and many of the associated algorithmic questions are…
Probabilistic omega-automata are variants of nondeterministic automata for infinite words where all choices are resolved by probabilistic distributions. Acceptance of an infinite input word can be defined in different ways: by requiring…
A $d$-limited automaton is a Turing machine that may rewrite each input cell at most~$d$ times. Hibbard (1967) showed that for every $d \geq 2$ such automata recognize all context-free languages and that deterministic $d$-limited automata…
We investigate the conversion of one-way nondeterministic finite automata and context-free grammars into Parikh equivalent one-way and two-way deterministic finite automata, from a descriptional complexity point of view. We prove that for…
We present several new results and connections between various extensions of finite automata through the study of vector automata and homing vector automata. We show that homing vector automata outperform extended finite automata when both…
We present a new technique for demonstrating the reachability of states in deterministic finite automata representing the concatenation of two languages. Such demonstrations are a necessary step in establishing the state complexity of the…
We introduce a new measure on regular languages: their nondeterministic syntactic complexity. It is the least degree of any extension of the `canonical boolean representation' of the syntactic monoid. Equivalently, it is the least number of…
The transformation of a nondeterministic finite-state automaton into a deterministic finite-state automaton is an integral part of any course on formal languages and automata theory. For some students, understanding this transformation is…
Consider nondeterministic finite automata recognizing base-k positional notation of numbers. Assume that numbers are read starting from their least significant digits. It is proved that if two sets of numbers S and T are represented by…
It is undecidable whether the language recognized by a probabilistic finite automaton is empty. Several other undecidability results, in particular regarding problems about matrix products, are based on this important theorem. We present…
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…