English

A Lower Bound for Primality of Finite Languages

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2019-02-19 v1

Abstract

A regular language LL is said to be prime, if it is not the product of two non-trivial languages. Martens et al. settled the exact complexity of deciding primality for deterministic finite automata in 2010. For finite languages, Mateescu et al. and Wieczorek suspect the NP - completeness\mathrm{NP}\text{ - }completeness of primality, but no actual bounds are given. Using techniques of Martens et al., we prove the NP\mathrm{NP} lower bound and give a Π2P\Pi_{2}^{\mathrm{P}} upper bound for deciding primality of finite languages given as deterministic finite automata.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.06253,
  title  = {A Lower Bound for Primality of Finite Languages},
  author = {Philip Sieder},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.06253},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

18 pages; this paper is essentially my bachelor thesis submitted on 28th April 2017; we (Prof. Dr. Wim Martens, Dr. Matthias Niewerth, Johannes Doleschal and I) plan to release it as part of a more profound paper

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:42:58.555Z