2,125 research outputs found
One-Tape Turing Machine Variants and Language Recognition
We present two restricted versions of one-tape Turing machines. Both
characterize the class of context-free languages. In the first version,
proposed by Hibbard in 1967 and called limited automata, each tape cell can be
rewritten only in the first visits, for a fixed constant .
Furthermore, for deterministic limited automata are equivalent to
deterministic pushdown automata, namely they characterize deterministic
context-free languages. Further restricting the possible operations, we
consider strongly limited automata. These models still characterize
context-free languages. However, the deterministic version is less powerful
than the deterministic version of limited automata. In fact, there exist
deterministic context-free languages that are not accepted by any deterministic
strongly limited automaton.Comment: 20 pages. This article will appear in the Complexity Theory Column of
the September 2015 issue of SIGACT New
Multi-Head Finite Automata: Characterizations, Concepts and Open Problems
Multi-head finite automata were introduced in (Rabin, 1964) and (Rosenberg,
1966). Since that time, a vast literature on computational and descriptional
complexity issues on multi-head finite automata documenting the importance of
these devices has been developed. Although multi-head finite automata are a
simple concept, their computational behavior can be already very complex and
leads to undecidable or even non-semi-decidable problems on these devices such
as, for example, emptiness, finiteness, universality, equivalence, etc. These
strong negative results trigger the study of subclasses and alternative
characterizations of multi-head finite automata for a better understanding of
the nature of non-recursive trade-offs and, thus, the borderline between
decidable and undecidable problems. In the present paper, we tour a fragment of
this literature
Unary Pushdown Automata and Straight-Line Programs
We consider decision problems for deterministic pushdown automata over a
unary alphabet (udpda, for short). Udpda are a simple computation model that
accept exactly the unary regular languages, but can be exponentially more
succinct than finite-state automata. We complete the complexity landscape for
udpda by showing that emptiness (and thus universality) is P-hard, equivalence
and compressed membership problems are P-complete, and inclusion is
coNP-complete. Our upper bounds are based on a translation theorem between
udpda and straight-line programs over the binary alphabet (SLPs). We show that
the characteristic sequence of any udpda can be represented as a pair of
SLPs---one for the prefix, one for the lasso---that have size linear in the
size of the udpda and can be computed in polynomial time. Hence, decision
problems on udpda are reduced to decision problems on SLPs. Conversely, any SLP
can be converted in logarithmic space into a udpda, and this forms the basis
for our lower bound proofs. We show coNP-hardness of the ordered matching
problem for SLPs, from which we derive coNP-hardness for inclusion. In
addition, we complete the complexity landscape for unary nondeterministic
pushdown automata by showing that the universality problem is -hard, using a new class of integer expressions. Our techniques have
applications beyond udpda. We show that our results imply -completeness for a natural fragment of Presburger arithmetic and coNP lower
bounds for compressed matching problems with one-character wildcards
Finite state verifiers with constant randomness
We give a new characterization of as the class of languages
whose members have certificates that can be verified with small error in
polynomial time by finite state machines that use a constant number of random
bits, as opposed to its conventional description in terms of deterministic
logarithmic-space verifiers. It turns out that allowing two-way interaction
with the prover does not change the class of verifiable languages, and that no
polynomially bounded amount of randomness is useful for constant-memory
computers when used as language recognizers, or public-coin verifiers. A
corollary of our main result is that the class of outcome problems
corresponding to O(log n)-space bounded games of incomplete information where
the universal player is allowed a constant number of moves equals NL.Comment: 17 pages. An improved versio
Quantum computation with devices whose contents are never read
In classical computation, a "write-only memory" (WOM) is little more than an
oxymoron, and the addition of WOM to a (deterministic or probabilistic)
classical computer brings no advantage. We prove that quantum computers that
are augmented with WOM can solve problems that neither a classical computer
with WOM nor a quantum computer without WOM can solve, when all other resource
bounds are equal. We focus on realtime quantum finite automata, and examine the
increase in their power effected by the addition of WOMs with different access
modes and capacities. Some problems that are unsolvable by two-way
probabilistic Turing machines using sublogarithmic amounts of read/write memory
are shown to be solvable by these enhanced automata.Comment: 32 pages, a preliminary version of this work was presented in the 9th
International Conference on Unconventional Computation (UC2010
Practical experiments with regular approximation of context-free languages
Several methods are discussed that construct a finite automaton given a
context-free grammar, including both methods that lead to subsets and those
that lead to supersets of the original context-free language. Some of these
methods of regular approximation are new, and some others are presented here in
a more refined form with respect to existing literature. Practical experiments
with the different methods of regular approximation are performed for
spoken-language input: hypotheses from a speech recognizer are filtered through
a finite automaton.Comment: 28 pages. To appear in Computational Linguistics 26(1), March 200
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