5,189 research outputs found
Synchronizing weighted automata
We introduce two generalizations of synchronizability to automata with
transitions weighted in an arbitrary semiring K=(K,+,*,0,1). (or equivalently,
to finite sets of matrices in K^nxn.) Let us call a matrix A
location-synchronizing if there exists a column in A consisting of nonzero
entries such that all the other columns of A are filled by zeros. If
additionally all the entries of this designated column are the same, we call A
synchronizing. Note that these notions coincide for stochastic matrices and
also in the Boolean semiring. A set M of matrices in K^nxn is called
(location-)synchronizing if M generates a matrix subsemigroup containing a
(location-)synchronizing matrix. The K-(location-)synchronizability problem is
the following: given a finite set M of nxn matrices with entries in K, is it
(location-)synchronizing?
Both problems are PSPACE-hard for any nontrivial semiring. We give sufficient
conditions for the semiring K when the problems are PSPACE-complete and show
several undecidability results as well, e.g. synchronizability is undecidable
if 1 has infinite order in (K,+,0) or when the free semigroup on two generators
can be embedded into (K,*,1).Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527
Computational Processes and Incompleteness
We introduce a formal definition of Wolfram's notion of computational process
based on cellular automata, a physics-like model of computation. There is a
natural classification of these processes into decidable, intermediate and
complete. It is shown that in the context of standard finite injury priority
arguments one cannot establish the existence of an intermediate computational
process
Invisible pushdown languages
Context free languages allow one to express data with hierarchical structure,
at the cost of losing some of the useful properties of languages recognized by
finite automata on words. However, it is possible to restore some of these
properties by making the structure of the tree visible, such as is done by
visibly pushdown languages, or finite automata on trees. In this paper, we show
that the structure given by such approaches remains invisible when it is read
by a finite automaton (on word). In particular, we show that separability with
a regular language is undecidable for visibly pushdown languages, just as it is
undecidable for general context free languages
Real-time and Probabilistic Temporal Logics: An Overview
Over the last two decades, there has been an extensive study on logical
formalisms for specifying and verifying real-time systems. Temporal logics have
been an important research subject within this direction. Although numerous
logics have been introduced for the formal specification of real-time and
complex systems, an up to date comprehensive analysis of these logics does not
exist in the literature. In this paper we analyse real-time and probabilistic
temporal logics which have been widely used in this field. We extrapolate the
notions of decidability, axiomatizability, expressiveness, model checking, etc.
for each logic analysed. We also provide a comparison of features of the
temporal logics discussed
Automaton Semigroups and Groups: On the Undecidability of Problems Related to Freeness and Finiteness
In this paper, we study algorithmic problems for automaton semigroups and
automaton groups related to freeness and finiteness. In the course of this
study, we also exhibit some connections between the algebraic structure of
automaton (semi)groups and their dynamics on the boundary. First, we show that
it is undecidable to check whether the group generated by a given invertible
automaton has a positive relation, i.e. a relation p = 1 such that p only
contains positive generators. Besides its obvious relation to the freeness of
the group, the absence of positive relations has previously been studied and is
connected to the triviality of some stabilizers of the boundary. We show that
the emptiness of the set of positive relations is equivalent to the dynamical
property that all (directed positive) orbital graphs centered at non-singular
points are acyclic.
Gillibert showed that the finiteness problem for automaton semigroups is
undecidable. In the second part of the paper, we show that this undecidability
result also holds if the input is restricted to be bi-reversible and invertible
(but, in general, not complete). As an immediate consequence, we obtain that
the finiteness problem for automaton subsemigroups of semigroups generated by
invertible, yet partial automata, so called automaton-inverse semigroups, is
also undecidable.
Erratum: Contrary to a statement in a previous version of the paper, our
approach does not show that that the freeness problem for automaton semigroups
is undecidable. We discuss this in an erratum at the end of the paper
When is Containment Decidable for Probabilistic Automata?
The containment problem for quantitative automata is the natural quantitative generalisation of the classical language inclusion problem for Boolean automata. We study it for probabilistic automata, where it is known to be undecidable in general. We restrict our study to the class of probabilistic automata with bounded ambiguity. There, we show decidability (subject to Schanuel's conjecture) when one of the automata is assumed to be unambiguous while the other one is allowed to be finitely ambiguous. Furthermore, we show that this is close to the most general decidable fragment of this problem by proving that it is already undecidable if one of the automata is allowed to be linearly ambiguous
Undecidable properties of self-affine sets and multi-tape automata
We study the decidability of the topological properties of some objects
coming from fractal geometry. We prove that having empty interior is
undecidable for the sets defined by two-dimensional graph-directed iterated
function systems. These results are obtained by studying a particular class of
self-affine sets associated with multi-tape automata. We first establish the
undecidability of some language-theoretical properties of such automata, which
then translate into undecidability results about their associated self-affine
sets.Comment: 10 pages, v2 includes some corrections to match the published versio
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