English

A Short Decidability Proof for DPDA Language Equivalence via First-Order Grammars

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2011-03-10 v4

Abstract

The main aim of the paper is to give a short self-contained proof of the decidability of language equivalence for deterministic pushdown automata, which is the famous problem solved by G. Senizergues, for which C. Stirling has derived a primitive recursive complexity upper bound. The proof here is given in the framework of first-order grammars, which seems to be particularly apt for the aim. An appendix presents a modification of Stirling's approach, yielding a complexity bound of the form tetr(2,g(n)) where tetr is the (nonelementary) operator of iterated exponentiation (tetration) and g is an elementary function of the input size.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1010.4760,
  title  = {A Short Decidability Proof for DPDA Language Equivalence via First-Order Grammars},
  author = {Petr Jancar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.4760},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

28 pages, version 4 reworks the main proof and omits the nondeterministic case where a problem was found by G. Senizergues

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:32:54.682Z