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 $d$ visits, for a fixed constant $d\geq 2$. Furthermore, for $d=2$ 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

On the state complexity of semi-quantum finite automata

Some of the most interesting and important results concerning quantum finite automata are those showing that they can recognize certain languages with (much) less resources than corresponding classical finite automata \cite{Amb98,Amb09,AmYa11,Ber05,Fre09,Mer00,Mer01,Mer02,Yak10,ZhgQiu112,Zhg12}. This paper shows three results of such a type that are stronger in some sense than other ones because (a) they deal with models of quantum automata with very little quantumness (so-called semi-quantum one- and two-way automata with one qubit memory only); (b) differences, even comparing with probabilistic classical automata, are bigger than expected; (c) a trade-off between the number of classical and quantum basis states needed is demonstrated in one case and (d) languages (or the promise problem) used to show main results are very simple and often explored ones in automata theory or in communication complexity, with seemingly little structure that could be utilized.Comment: 19 pages. We improve (make stronger) the results in section

Multipass automata and group word problems

We introduce the notion of multipass automata as a generalization of pushdown automata and study the classes of languages accepted by such machines. The class of languages accepted by deterministic multipass automata is exactly the Boolean closure of the class of deterministic context-free languages while the class of languages accepted by nondeterministic multipass automata is exactly the class of poly-context-free languages, that is, languages which are the intersection of finitely many context-free languages. We illustrate the use of these automata by studying groups whose word problems are in the above classes