Related papers: Around Don's conjecture for binary completely reac…
A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] \cdots w[i_k]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq \vert w \vert$. A word $w$ is \emph{$k$-subsequence universal} over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if…
The states of a deterministic finite automaton A can be identified with collections of words in Pf(L(A)) -- the set of prefixes of words belonging to the regular language accepted by A. But words can be ordered and among the many possible…
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…
The \v{C}ern\'y conjecture (\v{C}ern\'y, 1964) states that each n-state \san\ possess a \sw\ of length $(n-1)^2$. From the other side the best upper bound for the \rl\ of n-state \sa\ known so far is equal to $\frac{n^3-n}6$ (Pin, 1983) and…
A word $u$ is a subsequence of another word $w$ if $u$ can be obtained from $w$ by deleting some of its letters. The word $w$ with alph$(w)=\Sigma$ is called $k$-subsequence universal if the set of subsequences of length $k$ of $w$ contains…
Indexing strings via prefix (or suffix) sorting is, arguably, one of the most successful algorithmic techniques developed in the last decades. Can indexing be extended to languages? The main contribution of this paper is to initiate the…
We construct a probabilistic finite automaton (PFA) with 7 states and an input alphabet of 5 symbols for which the PFA Emptiness Problem is undecidable. The only input for the decision problem is the starting distribution. For the proof, we…
Multi-letter {\it quantum finite automata} (QFAs) were a quantum variant of classical {\it one-way multi-head finite automata} (J. Hromkovi\v{c}, Acta Informatica 19 (1983) 377-384), and it has been shown that this new one-way QFAs…
We tackle the problem of the randomized generation of slowly synchronizing deterministic automata (DFAs) by generating random primitive sets of matrices. We show that when the randomized procedure is too simple the exponent of the generated…
Br\"uggemann-Klein and Wood define a one-unambiguous regular language as a language that can be recognized by a deterministic Glushkov automaton. They give a procedure performed on the minimal DFA, the BW-test, to decide whether a language…
We present a few classes of synchronizing automata exhibiting certain extremal properties with regard to synchronization. The first is a series of automata with subsets whose shortest extending words are of length $\varTheta(n^2)$, where…
We extend results regarding a combinatorial model introduced by Black, Drellich, and Tymoczko (2017+) which generalizes the folding of the RNA molecule in biology. Consider a word on alphabet $\{A_1, \overline{A}_1, \ldots, A_m,…
Finite automata (FA) are a fundamental computational abstraction that is widely used in practice for various tasks in computer science, linguistics, biology, electrical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Given an input word, an FA…
Regular transition systems (RTS) are a popular formalism for modeling infinite-state systems in general, and parameterised systems in particular. In a CONCUR 22 paper, Esparza et al. introduce a novel approach to the verification of RTS,…
Any two-way finite state automaton is equivalent to some one-way finite state automaton. This well-known result, shown by Rabin and Scott and independently by Shepherdson, states that two-way finite state automata (even non-deterministic)…
We prove that, paying a polynomial increase in size only, every unrestricted two-way nondeterministic finite automaton (2NFA) can be complemented by a 1-limited automaton (1-LA), a nondeterministic extension of 2NFAs still characterizing…
Given a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) A with m states, and a natural number n (presented in unary), the #NFA problem asks to determine the size of the set L(A_n) of words of length n accepted by A. While the corresponding…
A factor $u$ of a word $w$ is a cover of $w$ if every position in $w$ lies within some occurrence of $u$ in $w$. A word $w$ covered by $u$ thus generalizes the idea of a repetition, that is, a word composed of exact concatenations of $u$.…
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…
A synchronizing word for an automaton is a word that brings that automaton into one and the same state, regardless of the starting position. Cerny conjectured in 1964 that if a n-state deterministic automaton has a synchronizing word, then…