Related papers: Around Don's conjecture for binary completely reac…
We introduce the notion of expandability in the context of automaton semigroups and groups: a word is k-expandable if one can append a suffix to it such that the size of the orbit under the action of the automaton increases by at least k.…
The reachability problem in multi-pushdown automata (MPDA) has many applications in static analysis of recursive programs. An example is safety verification of multi-threaded recursive programs with shared memory. Since these problems are…
Let the root of the word $w$ be the smallest prefix $v$ of $w$ such that $w$ is a prefix of $vvv...$. $per(w)$ is the length of the root of $w$. For any $n\ge5$, an $n$-ary threshold word is a word $w$ such that for any factor (subword) $v$…
A deterministic finite automaton is synchronizing if there exists a word that sends all states of the automaton to the same state. \v{C}ern\'y conjectured in 1964 that a synchronizing automaton with $n$ states has a synchronizing word of…
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…
We describe a uniform construction for converting $\omega$-automata with arbitrary acceptance conditions (based on the notion of infinity sets i.e. the set of states visited infinitely often in a run of the automaton) to equivalent…
We investigate the shuffle operation on regular languages represented by complete deterministic finite automata. We prove that $f(m,n)=2^{mn-1} + 2^{(m-1)(n-1)}(2^{m-1}-1)(2^{n-1}-1)$ is an upper bound on the state complexity of the shuffle…
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
#NFA refers to the problem of counting the words of length $n$ accepted by a non-deterministic finite automaton. #NFA is #P-hard, and although fully-polynomial-time randomized approximation schemes (FPRAS) exist, they are all impractical.…
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.…
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…
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 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…
It is shown that, for every $n \geqslant 2$, the maximum length of the shortest string accepted by an $n$-state direction-determinate two-way finite automaton is exactly $\binom{n}{\lfloor\frac{n}{2}\rfloor}-1$ (direction-determinate…
The well known open \v{C}ern\'y conjecture states that each \san with $n$ states has a \sw of length at most $(n-1)^2$. On the other hand, the best known upper bound is cubic of $n$. Recently, in the paper \cite{CARPI1} of Alessandro and…
Decidability of the determinization problem for weighted automata over the semiring $(\mathbb{Z} \cup {-\infty}, \max, +)$, WA for short, is a long-standing open question. We propose two ways of approaching it by constraining the search…
We report some further developments regarding the language theory of higher-dimensional automata (HDAs). Regular languages of HDAs are sets of finite interval partially ordered multisets (pomsets) with interfaces. We show a pumping lemma…
Twins in a finite word are formed by a pair of identical subwords placed at disjoint sets of positions. We investigate the maximum length of twins in a random word over a $k$-letter alphabet. The obtained lower bounds for small values of…
We exhibit the construction of a deterministic automaton that, given k > 0, recognizes the (regular) language of k-differentiable words. Our approach follows a scheme of Crochemore et al. based on minimal forbidden words. We extend this…
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…