16,483 research outputs found
Hairdressing in groups: a survey of combings and formal languages
A group is combable if it can be represented by a language of words
satisfying a fellow traveller property; an automatic group has a synchronous
combing which is a regular language. This article surveys results for combable
groups, in particular in the case where the combing is a formal language.Comment: 17 pages. Published copy, also available at
http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/gt/GTMon1/paper24.abs.htm
The Computational Complexity of Symbolic Dynamics at the Onset of Chaos
In a variety of studies of dynamical systems, the edge of order and chaos has
been singled out as a region of complexity. It was suggested by Wolfram, on the
basis of qualitative behaviour of cellular automata, that the computational
basis for modelling this region is the Universal Turing Machine. In this paper,
following a suggestion of Crutchfield, we try to show that the Turing machine
model may often be too powerful as a computational model to describe the
boundary of order and chaos. In particular we study the region of the first
accumulation of period doubling in unimodal and bimodal maps of the interval,
from the point of view of language theory. We show that in relation to the
``extended'' Chomsky hierarchy, the relevant computational model in the
unimodal case is the nested stack automaton or the related indexed languages,
while the bimodal case is modeled by the linear bounded automaton or the
related context-sensitive languages.Comment: 1 reference corrected, 1 reference added, minor changes in body of
manuscrip
On the Hierarchy of Block Deterministic Languages
A regular language is -lookahead deterministic (resp. -block
deterministic) if it is specified by a -lookahead deterministic (resp.
-block deterministic) regular expression. These two subclasses of regular
languages have been respectively introduced by Han and Wood (-lookahead
determinism) and by Giammarresi et al. (-block determinism) as a possible
extension of one-unambiguous languages defined and characterized by
Br\"uggemann-Klein and Wood. In this paper, we study the hierarchy and the
inclusion links of these families. We first show that each -block
deterministic language is the alphabetic image of some one-unambiguous
language. Moreover, we show that the conversion from a minimal DFA of a
-block deterministic regular language to a -block deterministic automaton
not only requires state elimination, and that the proof given by Han and Wood
of a proper hierarchy in -block deterministic languages based on this result
is erroneous. Despite these results, we show by giving a parameterized family
that there is a proper hierarchy in -block deterministic regular languages.
We also prove that there is a proper hierarchy in -lookahead deterministic
regular languages by studying particular properties of unary regular
expressions. Finally, using our valid results, we confirm that the family of
-block deterministic regular languages is strictly included into the one of
-lookahead deterministic regular languages by showing that any -block
deterministic unary language is one-unambiguous
Three hierarchies of transducers
Composition of top-down tree transducers yields a proper hierarchy of transductions and of output languages. The same is true for ETOL systems (viewed as transducers) and for two-way generalized sequential machines
Step-Indexed Logical Relations for Probability (long version)
It is well-known that constructing models of higher-order probabilistic
programming languages is challenging. We show how to construct step-indexed
logical relations for a probabilistic extension of a higher-order programming
language with impredicative polymorphism and recursive types. We show that the
resulting logical relation is sound and complete with respect to the contextual
preorder and, moreover, that it is convenient for reasoning about concrete
program equivalences. Finally, we extend the language with dynamically
allocated first-order references and show how to extend the logical relation to
this language. We show that the resulting relation remains useful for reasoning
about examples involving both state and probabilistic choice.Comment: Extended version with appendix of a FoSSaCS'15 pape
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