Related papers: Resolving Nondeterminism by Chance
Grammatical inference consists in learning a formal grammar as a finite state machine or as a set of rewrite rules. In this paper, we are concerned with inferring Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA) that must accept some words, and…
The problem if a given configuration of a pushdown automaton (PDA) is bisimilar with some (unspecified) finite-state process is shown to be decidable. The decidability is proven in the framework of first-order grammars, which are given by…
The problem of combinatorial filter reduction arises from questions of resource optimization in robots; it is one specific way in which automation can help to achieve minimalism, to build better, simpler robots. This paper contributes a new…
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…
Programs with dynamic allocation are able to create and use an unbounded number of fresh resources, such as references, objects, files, etc. We propose History-Register Automata (HRA), a new automata-theoretic formalism for modelling such…
We observe that the classical Cartesian product construction for the intersection of (languages of) nondeterministic finite automata (NFA) is non-optimal in the worst case, if the automata have many transitions. For a fixed alphabet, the…
A fundamental question in logic and verification is the following: for which unary predicates $P_1, \ldots, P_k$ is the monadic second-order theory of $\langle \mathbb{N}; <, P_1, \ldots, P_k \rangle$ decidable? Equivalently, for which…
The ambiguity of a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) N for input size n is the maximal number of accepting computations of N for an input of size n. For all k, r 2 N we construct languages Lr,k which can be recognized by NFA's with…
Automata over infinite words, also known as omega-automata, play a key role in the verification and synthesis of reactive systems. The spectrum of omega-automata is defined by two characteristics: the acceptance condition (e.g. B\"uchi or…
These lecture notes are intended as a supplement to Moore and Mertens' The Nature of Computation or as a standalone resource, and are available to anyone who wants to use them. Comments are welcome, and please let me know if you use these…
In this work we deal with a mechanism for process simulation called a NonDeterministic Stochastic Activity Network (NDSAN). An NDSAN consists basically of a set of activities along with precedence relations involving these activities, which…
Finite automata with weights in the max-plus semiring are considered. The main result is: it is decidable in an effective way whether a series that is recognized by a finitely ambiguous max-plus automaton is unambiguous, or is sequential. A…
A central question in the theory of automata is which classes of automata can be minimized in polynomial time. We close the remaining gaps for deterministic and history-deterministic automata over infinite words by proving that…
Many preference elicitation algorithms consider preference over propositional logic formulas or items with different attributes. In sequential decision making, a user's preference can be a preorder over possible outcomes, each of which is a…
In various models of one-way pushdown automata, the explicit use of two designated endmarkers on a read-once input tape has proven to be extremely useful for making a conscious, final decision on the acceptance/rejection of each input word…
Families of DFAs (FDFAs) have recently been introduced as a new representation of $\omega$-regular languages. They target ultimately periodic words, with acceptors revolving around accepting some representation $u\cdot v^\omega$. Three…
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 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…
We prove that two-way probabilistic and quantum finite automata (2PFA's and 2QFA's) can be considerably more concise than both their one-way versions (1PFA's and 1QFA's), and two-way nondeterministic finite automata (2NFA's). For this…
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…