Descriptional Complexity of Finite Automata -- Selected Highlights

The state complexity, respectively, nondeterministic state complexity of a regular language $L$ is the number of states of the minimal deterministic, respectively, of a minimal nondeterministic finite automaton for $L$. Some of the most studied state complexity questions deal with size comparisons of nondeterministic finite automata of differing degree of ambiguity. More generally, if for a regular language we compare the size of description by a finite automaton and by a more powerful language definition mechanism, such as a context-free grammar, we encounter non-recursive trade-offs. Operational state complexity studies the state complexity of the language resulting from a regularity preserving operation as a function of the complexity of the argument languages. Determining the state complexity of combined operations is generally challenging and for general combinations of operations that include intersection and marked concatenation it is uncomputable

Checking Whether an Automaton Is Monotonic Is NP-complete

An automaton is monotonic if its states can be arranged in a linear order that is preserved by the action of every letter. We prove that the problem of deciding whether a given automaton is monotonic is NP-complete. The same result is obtained for oriented automata, whose states can be arranged in a cyclic order. Moreover, both problems remain hard under the restriction to binary input alphabets.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. CIAA 2015. The final publication is available at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22360-5_2

Satisfiability and model checking for the logic of sub-intervals under the homogeneity assumption

In this paper, we investigate the finite satisfiability and model checking problems for the logic D of the sub-interval relation under the homogeneity assumption, that constrains a proposition letter to hold over an interval if and only if it holds over all its points. First, we prove that the satisfiability problem for D, over finite linear orders, is PSPACE-complete; then, we show that its model checking problem, over finite Kripke structures, is PSPACE-complete as well

State complexity of Kleene-star operations on regulat tree languages

The concatenation of trees can be defined either as a sequential or a parallel operation, and the corresponding iterated operation gives an extension of Kleene-star to tree languages. Since the sequential tree concatenation is not associative, we get two essentially different iterated sequential concatenation operations that we call the bottom-up star and top-down star operation, respectively. We establish that the worst-case state complexity of bottom-up star is (n + 3/2) · 2 n−1. The bound differs by an order of magnitude from the corresponding result for string languages. The state complexity of top-down star is similar as in the string case. We consider also the state complexity of the star of the concatenation of a regular tree language with the set of all trees

Lower bounds for the size of deterministic unranked tree automata

AbstractTree automata operating on unranked trees use regular languages, called horizontal languages, to define the transitions of the vertical states that define the bottom-up computation of the automaton. It is well known that the deterministic tree automaton with smallest total number of states, that is, number of vertical states and number of states used to define the horizontal languages, is not unique and it is hard to establish lower bounds for the total number of states. By relying on existing bounds for the size of unambiguous finite automata, we give a lower bound for the size blow-up of determinizing a nondeterministic unranked tree automaton. The lower bound improves the earlier known lower bound that was based on an ad hoc construction