58 research outputs found
Multi-Head Finite Automata: Characterizations, Concepts and Open Problems
Multi-head finite automata were introduced in (Rabin, 1964) and (Rosenberg,
1966). Since that time, a vast literature on computational and descriptional
complexity issues on multi-head finite automata documenting the importance of
these devices has been developed. Although multi-head finite automata are a
simple concept, their computational behavior can be already very complex and
leads to undecidable or even non-semi-decidable problems on these devices such
as, for example, emptiness, finiteness, universality, equivalence, etc. These
strong negative results trigger the study of subclasses and alternative
characterizations of multi-head finite automata for a better understanding of
the nature of non-recursive trade-offs and, thus, the borderline between
decidable and undecidable problems. In the present paper, we tour a fragment of
this literature
An in-between "implicit" and "explicit" complexity: Automata
Implicit Computational Complexity makes two aspects implicit, by manipulating
programming languages rather than models of com-putation, and by internalizing
the bounds rather than using external measure. We survey how automata theory
contributed to complexity with a machine-dependant with implicit bounds model
Finite state verifiers with constant randomness
We give a new characterization of as the class of languages
whose members have certificates that can be verified with small error in
polynomial time by finite state machines that use a constant number of random
bits, as opposed to its conventional description in terms of deterministic
logarithmic-space verifiers. It turns out that allowing two-way interaction
with the prover does not change the class of verifiable languages, and that no
polynomially bounded amount of randomness is useful for constant-memory
computers when used as language recognizers, or public-coin verifiers. A
corollary of our main result is that the class of outcome problems
corresponding to O(log n)-space bounded games of incomplete information where
the universal player is allowed a constant number of moves equals NL.Comment: 17 pages. An improved versio
Computing with cells: membrane systems - some complexity issues.
Membrane computing is a branch of natural computing which abstracts computing models from the structure and the functioning of the living cell. The main ingredients of membrane systems, called P systems, are (i) the membrane structure, which consists of a hierarchical arrangements of membranes which delimit compartments where (ii) multisets of symbols, called objects, evolve according to (iii) sets of rules which are localised and associated with compartments. By using the rules in a nondeterministic/deterministic maximally parallel manner, transitions between the system configurations can be obtained. A sequence of transitions is a computation of how the system is evolving. Various ways of controlling the transfer of objects from one membrane to another and applying the rules, as well as possibilities to dissolve, divide or create membranes have been studied. Membrane systems have a great potential for implementing massively concurrent systems in an efficient way that would allow us to solve currently intractable problems once future biotechnology gives way to a practical bio-realization. In this paper we survey some interesting and fundamental complexity issues such as universality vs. nonuniversality, determinism vs. nondeterminism, membrane and alphabet size hierarchies, characterizations of context-sensitive languages and other language classes and various notions of parallelism
Superiority of one-way and realtime quantum machines and new directions
In automata theory, the quantum computation has been widely examined for
finite state machines, known as quantum finite automata (QFAs), and less
attention has been given to the QFAs augmented with counters or stacks.
Moreover, to our knowledge, there is no result related to QFAs having more than
one input head. In this paper, we focus on such generalizations of QFAs whose
input head(s) operate(s) in one-way or realtime mode and present many
superiority of them to their classical counterparts. Furthermore, we propose
some open problems and conjectures in order to investigate the power of
quantumness better. We also give some new results on classical computation.Comment: A revised edition with some correction
On equivalence, languages equivalence and minimization of multi-letter and multi-letter measure-many quantum automata
We first show that given a -letter quantum finite automata
and a -letter quantum finite automata over
the same input alphabet , they are equivalent if and only if they are
-equivalent where , , are the
numbers of state in respectively, and . By
applying a method, due to the author, used to deal with the equivalence problem
of {\it measure many one-way quantum finite automata}, we also show that a
-letter measure many quantum finite automaton and a
-letter measure many quantum finite automaton are
equivalent if and only if they are -equivalent
where , , are the numbers of state in respectively,
and .
Next, we study the language equivalence problem of those two kinds of quantum
finite automata. We show that for -letter quantum finite automata, the
non-strict cut-point language equivalence problem is undecidable, i.e., it is
undecidable whether
where
and are -letter quantum finite automata.
Further, we show that both strict and non-strict cut-point language equivalence
problem for -letter measure many quantum finite automata are undecidable.
The direct consequences of the above outcomes are summarized in the paper.
Finally, we comment on existing proofs about the minimization problem of one
way quantum finite automata not only because we have been showing great
interest in this kind of problem, which is very important in classical automata
theory, but also due to that the problem itself, personally, is a challenge.
This problem actually remains open.Comment: 30 pages, conclusion section correcte
Transitive Closure Logic and Multihead Automata with Nested Pebbles
Several extensions of first-order logic are studied in descriptive complexity theory. These extensions include transitive closure logic and deterministic transitive closure logic, which extend first-order logic with transitive closure operators. It is known that deterministic transitive closure logic captures the complexity class of the languages that are decidable by some deterministic Turing machine using a logarithmic amount of memory space. An analogous result holds for transitive closure logic and nondeterministic Turing machines.
This thesis concerns the k-ary fragments of these two logics. In each k-ary fragment, the arities of transitive closure operators appearing in formulas are restricted to a nonzero natural number k. The expressivity of these fragments can be studied in terms of multihead finite automata. The type of automaton that we consider in this thesis is a two-way multihead automaton with nested pebbles.
We look at the expressive power of multihead automata and the k-ary fragments of transitive closure logics in the class of finite structures called word models. We show that deterministic twoway k-head automata with nested pebbles have the same expressive power as first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive closure. For a corresponding result in the case of nondeterministic automata, we restrict to the positive fragment of k-ary transitive closure logic. The two theorems and their proofs are based on the article ’Automata with nested pebbles capture first-order logic with transitive closure’ by Joost Engelfriet and Hendrik Jan Hoogeboom. In the article, the results are proved in the case of trees. Since word models can be viewed as a special type of trees, the theorems considered in this thesis are a special case of a more general result
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