Symmetries of Automata

Content in the UH Research Archive is made available for personal research, educational, and non-commercial purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, all content is protected by copyright, and in the absence of an open license, permissions for further re-use should be sought from the publisher, the author, or other copyright holder.For a given reachable automaton A, we prove that the (state-)endomorphism monoid End(A) divides its characteristic monoid M(A). Hence so does its (state-)automorphism group Aut(A), and, for finite A, Aut(A) is a homomorphic image of a subgroup of the characteristic monoid. It follows that in the presence of a (state-) automorphism group G of A, a finite automaton A (and its transformation monoid) always has a decomposition as a divisor of the wreath product of two transformation semigroups whose semigroups are divisors of M(A), namely the symmetry group G and the quotient of M(A) induced by the action of G. Moreover, this division is an embedding if M(A) is transitive on states of A. For more general automorphisms, which may be non-trivial on input letters, counterexamples show that they need not be induced by any corresponding characteristic monoid element.Peer reviewe

Automata theory in nominal sets

We study languages over infinite alphabets equipped with some structure that can be tested by recognizing automata. We develop a framework for studying such alphabets and the ensuing automata theory, where the key role is played by an automorphism group of the alphabet. In the process, we generalize nominal sets due to Gabbay and Pitts

Local Causal States and Discrete Coherent Structures

Coherent structures form spontaneously in nonlinear spatiotemporal systems and are found at all spatial scales in natural phenomena from laboratory hydrodynamic flows and chemical reactions to ocean, atmosphere, and planetary climate dynamics. Phenomenologically, they appear as key components that organize the macroscopic behaviors in such systems. Despite a century of effort, they have eluded rigorous analysis and empirical prediction, with progress being made only recently. As a step in this, we present a formal theory of coherent structures in fully-discrete dynamical field theories. It builds on the notion of structure introduced by computational mechanics, generalizing it to a local spatiotemporal setting. The analysis' main tool employs the \localstates, which are used to uncover a system's hidden spatiotemporal symmetries and which identify coherent structures as spatially-localized deviations from those symmetries. The approach is behavior-driven in the sense that it does not rely on directly analyzing spatiotemporal equations of motion, rather it considers only the spatiotemporal fields a system generates. As such, it offers an unsupervised approach to discover and describe coherent structures. We illustrate the approach by analyzing coherent structures generated by elementary cellular automata, comparing the results with an earlier, dynamic-invariant-set approach that decomposes fields into domains, particles, and particle interactions.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figures; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/dcs.ht

Lattice Gauge Tensor Networks

We present a unified framework to describe lattice gauge theories by means of tensor networks: this framework is efficient as it exploits the high amount of local symmetry content native of these systems describing only the gauge invariant subspace. Compared to a standard tensor network description, the gauge invariant one allows to speed-up real and imaginary time evolution of a factor that is up to the square of the dimension of the link variable. The gauge invariant tensor network description is based on the quantum link formulation, a compact and intuitive formulation for gauge theories on the lattice, and it is alternative to and can be combined with the global symmetric tensor network description. We present some paradigmatic examples that show how this architecture might be used to describe the physics of condensed matter and high-energy physics systems. Finally, we present a cellular automata analysis which estimates the gauge invariant Hilbert space dimension as a function of the number of lattice sites and that might guide the search for effective simplified models of complex theories.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figure

A coalgebraic semantics for causality in Petri nets

In this paper we revisit some pioneering efforts to equip Petri nets with compact operational models for expressing causality. The models we propose have a bisimilarity relation and a minimal representative for each equivalence class, and they can be fully explained as coalgebras on a presheaf category on an index category of partial orders. First, we provide a set-theoretic model in the form of a a causal case graph, that is a labeled transition system where states and transitions represent markings and firings of the net, respectively, and are equipped with causal information. Most importantly, each state has a poset representing causal dependencies among past events. Our first result shows the correspondence with behavior structure semantics as proposed by Trakhtenbrot and Rabinovich. Causal case graphs may be infinitely-branching and have infinitely many states, but we show how they can be refined to get an equivalent finitely-branching model. In it, states are equipped with symmetries, which are essential for the existence of a minimal, often finite-state, model. The next step is constructing a coalgebraic model. We exploit the fact that events can be represented as names, and event generation as name generation. Thus we can apply the Fiore-Turi framework: we model causal relations as a suitable category of posets with action labels, and generation of new events with causal dependencies as an endofunctor on this category. Then we define a well-behaved category of coalgebras. Our coalgebraic model is still infinite-state, but we exploit the equivalence between coalgebras over a class of presheaves and History Dependent automata to derive a compact representation, which is equivalent to our set-theoretical compact model. Remarkably, state reduction is automatically performed along the equivalence.Comment: Accepted by Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programmin