Related papers: On the Complexity of Intersection Non-emptiness fo…
We study three levels in a hierarchy of nondeterminism: A nondeterministic automaton $\mathcal{A}$ is determinizable by pruning (DBP) if we can obtain a deterministic automaton equivalent to $\mathcal{A}$ by removing some of its…
After an apparent hiatus of roughly 30 years, we revisit a seemingly neglected subject in the theory of (one-dimensional) cellular automata: sublinear-time computation. The model considered is that of ACAs, which are language acceptors…
Finitary Idealized Concurrent Algol (FICA) is a prototypical programming language combining functional, imperative, and concurrent computation. There exists a fully abstract game model of FICA, which in principle can be used to prove…
Deciding whether a graph can be embedded in a grid using only unit-length edges is NP-complete, even when restricted to binary trees. However, it is not difficult to devise a number of graph classes for which the problem is polynomial, even…
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…
A pendant vertex is one of degree one and an isolated vertex has degree zero. A neighborhood star-free (NSF for short) graph is one in which every vertex is contained in a triangle except pendant vertices and isolated vertices. This class…
We investigate structural complexity measures on digraphs, in particular the cycle rank. This concept is intimately related to a classical topic in formal language theory, namely the star height of regular languages. We explore this…
Multi-agent language systems can exhibit a failure mode where a shared dominant context progressively absorbs individual semantics, yielding near-uniform behavior across agents. We study this effect under the name Asymptotic Semantic…
A pattern $\alpha$ is a string of variables and terminal letters. We say that $\alpha$ matches a word $w$, consisting only of terminal letters, if $w$ can be obtained by replacing the variables of $\alpha$ by terminal words. The matching…
We consider variations on the following problem: given an NFA M and a pattern p, does there exist an x in L(M) such that p matches x? We consider the restricted problem where M only accepts a finite language. We also consider the variation…
We consider fragments of first-order logic and as models we allow finite and infinite words simultaneously. The only binary relations apart from equality are order comparison < and the successor predicate +1. We give characterizations of…
Constraint automata are an adaptation of B\"uchi-automata that process data words where the data comes from some relational structure S. Every transition of such an automaton comes with constraints in terms of the relations of S. A…
We study the complexity of basic regular operations on languages represented by incomplete deterministic or nondeterministic automata, in which all states are final. Such languages are known to be prefix-closed. We get tight bounds on both…
Cellular automata are one-dimensional arrays of interconnected interacting finite automata. We investigate one of the weakest classes, the real-time one-way cellular automata, and impose an additional restriction on their inter-cell…
We introduce the notions of topological entropy of a formal language and of a topological automaton. We show that the entropy function is surjective and bound the entropy of languages accepted by deterministic {\epsilon}-free push-down…
We study the problem of deciding whether a given language is directed. A language $L$ is \emph{directed} if every pair of words in $L$ have a common (scattered) superword in $L$. Deciding directedness is a fundamental problem in connection…
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…
Logics with team semantics provide alternative means for logical characterization of complexity classes. Both dependence and independence logic are known to capture non-deterministic polynomial time, and the frontiers of tractability in…
A graph class is monotone if it is closed under taking subgraphs. It is known that a monotone class defined by finitely many obstructions has bounded treewidth if and only if one of the obstructions is a so-called tripod, that is, a…
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,…