A Letter from the Outgoing Editor of IJNS

Dr. Russel Hirst says farewell to his time as Managing Editor at IJNS

Archway Commencement Issue, v. 19, no. 18, July 11, 1958

Archway v. 19, no. 18, July 11, 1958 - Commencement issue

Compressed Membership for NFA (DFA) with Compressed Labels is in NP (P)

In this paper, a compressed membership problem for finite automata, both deterministic and non-deterministic, with compressed transition labels is studied. The compression is represented by straight-line programs (SLPs), i.e. context-free grammars generating exactly one string. A novel technique of dealing with SLPs is introduced: the SLPs are recompressed, so that substrings of the input text are encoded in SLPs labelling the transitions of the NFA (DFA) in the same way, as in the SLP representing the input text. To this end, the SLPs are locally decompressed and then recompressed in a uniform way. Furthermore, such recompression induces only small changes in the automaton, in particular, the size of the automaton remains polynomial. Using this technique it is shown that the compressed membership for NFA with compressed labels is in NP, thus confirming the conjecture of Plandowski and Rytter and extending the partial result of Lohrey and Mathissen; as it is already known, that this problem is NP-hard, we settle its exact computational complexity. Moreover, the same technique applied to the compressed membership for DFA with compressed labels yields that this problem is in P; for this problem, only trivial upper-bound PSPACE was known

On-line construction of position heaps

We propose a simple linear-time on-line algorithm for constructing a position heap for a string [Ehrenfeucht et al, 2011]. Our definition of position heap differs slightly from the one proposed in [Ehrenfeucht et al, 2011] in that it considers the suffixes ordered from left to right. Our construction is based on classic suffix pointers and resembles the Ukkonen's algorithm for suffix trees [Ukkonen, 1995]. Using suffix pointers, the position heap can be extended into the augmented position heap that allows for a linear-time string matching algorithm [Ehrenfeucht et al, 2011].Comment: to appear in Journal of Discrete Algorithm