36,696 research outputs found
Formal Languages in Dynamical Systems
We treat here the interrelation between formal languages and those dynamical
systems that can be described by cellular automata (CA). There is a well-known
injective map which identifies any CA-invariant subshift with a central formal
language. However, in the special case of a symbolic dynamics, i.e. where the
CA is just the shift map, one gets a stronger result: the identification map
can be extended to a functor between the categories of symbolic dynamics and
formal languages. This functor additionally maps topological conjugacies
between subshifts to empty-string-limited generalized sequential machines
between languages. If the periodic points form a dense set, a case which arises
in a commonly used notion of chaotic dynamics, then an even more natural map to
assign a formal language to a subshift is offered. This map extends to a
functor, too. The Chomsky hierarchy measuring the complexity of formal
languages can be transferred via either of these functors from formal languages
to symbolic dynamics and proves to be a conjugacy invariant there. In this way
it acquires a dynamical meaning. After reviewing some results of the complexity
of CA-invariant subshifts, special attention is given to a new kind of
invariant subshift: the trapped set, which originates from the theory of
chaotic scattering and for which one can study complexity transitions.Comment: 23 pages, LaTe
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
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