A state of a dynamic computational structure distributed in an environment: a model and its corollaries

Currently there is great interest in computational models consisting of underlying regular computational environments, and built on them distributed computational structures. Examples of such models are cellular automata, spatial computation and space-time crystallography. For any computational model it is natural to define a functional equivalence of different but related computational structures. In the finite automata theory an example of such equivalence is automata homomorphism and, in particular, automata isomorphism. If we continue to stick to the finite automata theory, a fundamental question arise, what a state of a distributed computational structure is. This work is devoted to particular solution of the issue.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Determinising Parity Automata

Parity word automata and their determinisation play an important role in automata and game theory. We discuss a determinisation procedure for nondeterministic parity automata through deterministic Rabin to deterministic parity automata. We prove that the intermediate determinisation to Rabin automata is optimal. We show that the resulting determinisation to parity automata is optimal up to a small constant. Moreover, the lower bound refers to the more liberal Streett acceptance. We thus show that determinisation to Streett would not lead to better bounds than determinisation to parity. As a side-result, this optimality extends to the determinisation of B\"uchi automata

Advances and applications of automata on words and trees : executive summary

Seminar: 10501 - Advances and Applications of Automata on Words and Trees. The aim of the seminar was to discuss and systematize the recent fast progress in automata theory and to identify important directions for future research. For this, the seminar brought together more than 40 researchers from automata theory and related fields of applications. We had 19 talks of 30 minutes and 5 one-hour lectures leaving ample room for discussions. In the following we describe the topics in more detail