Combinatorics on Words 10th International Conference

This volume contains the Local Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on WORDS, that took place at the Kiel University, Germany, from the 14th to the 17th September 2015. WORDS is the main conference series devoted to the mathematical theory of words, and it takes place every two years. The first conference in the series was organised in 1997 in Rouen, France, with the following editions taking place in Rouen, Palermo,Turku, Montreal, Marseille, Salerno, Prague, and Turku. The main object in the scope of the conference, words, are finite or infinite sequences of symbols over a finite alphabet. They appear as natural and basic mathematical model in many areas, theoretical or applicative. Accordingly, the WORDS conference is open to both theoretical contributions related to combinatorial, algebraic, and algorithmic aspects of words, as well as to contributions presenting application of the theory of words, for instance, in other fields of computer science, inguistics, biology and bioinformatics, or physics. For the second time in the history of WORDS, after the 2013 edition, a refereed proceedings volume was published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. In addition, this local proceedings volume was published in the Kiel Computer Science Series of the Kiel University. Being a conference at the border between theoretical computer science and mathematics, WORDS tries to capture in its two proceedings volumes the characteristics of the conferences from both these worlds. While the Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume was dedicated to formal contributions, this local proceedings volume allows, in the spirit of mathematics conferences, the publication of several contributions informing on current research and work in progress in areas closely connected to the core topics of WORDS. All the papers, the ones published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science proceedings volume or the ones from this volume, were refereed to high standards by the members of the Program Committee. Following the conference, a special issue of the Theoretical Computer Science journal will be edited, containing extended versions of papers from both proceedings volumes. In total, the conference hosted 18 contributed talks. The papers on which 14 of these talks were based, were published in th LNCS volume; the other 4 are published in this volume. In addition to the contributed talks, the conference program included six invited talks given by leading experts in the areas covered by the WORDS conference: Jörg Endrullis (Amsterdam), Markus Lohrey (Siegen), Jean Néraud (Rouen), Dominique Perrin (Paris), Michaël Rao (Lyon), Thomas Stoll (Nancy). WORDS 2015 was the tenth conference in the series, so we were extremely happy to welcome, as invited speaker at this anniversary edition, Jean Néraud, one of the initiators of the series and the main organiser of the first two editions of this conference. We thank all the invited speakers and all the authors of submitted papers for their contributions to the the success of the conference. We are grateful to the members of the Program Committee for their work that lead to the selection of the contributed talks, and, implicitly, of the papers published in this volume. They were assisted in their task by a series of external referees, gratefully acknowledged below. The submission and reviewing process used the Easychair system; we thank Andrej Voronkov for this system which facilitated the work of the Programme Committee and the editors considerably. We grateful thank Gheorghe Iosif for designing the logo, poster, and banner of WORDS 2015; the logo of the conference can be seen on the front cover of this book. We also thank the editors of the Kiel Computer Science Series, especially Lasse Kliemann, for their support in editing this volume. Finally, we thank the Organising Committee of WORDS 2015 for ensuring the smooth run of the conference

Topological Complexity of Locally Finite omega-Languages

to appear in Archive for Mathematical LogicInternational audienceLocally finite omega-languages were introduced by Ressayre in [Formal Languages defined by the Underlying Structure of their Words, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 53 (4), December 1988, p. 1009-1026]. These languages are defined by local sentences and extend omega-languages accepted by Büchi automata or defined by monadic second order sentences. We investigate their topological complexity. All locally finite omega languages are analytic sets, the class LOC_omega of locally finite omega-languages meets all finite levels of the Borel hierarchy and there exist some locally finite omega-languages which are Borel sets of infinite rank or even analytic but non-Borel sets. This gives partial answers to questions of Simonnet [Automates et Théorie Descriptive, Ph. D. Thesis, Université Paris 7, March 1992] and of Duparc, Finkel, and Ressayre [Computer Science and the Fine Structure of Borel Sets, Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 257 (1-2), 2001, p.85-105]

SPECIAL ISSUE ON MEMBRANE COMPUTING, Seventh Brainstorming Week on Membrane Computing

The present volume contains a selection of papers resulting from the Seventh Brainstorming Week on Membrane Computing (BWMC7), held in Sevilla, from February 2 to February 6, 2009. The meeting was organized by the Research Group on Natural Computing (RGNC) from Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of Sevilla University. The previous editions of this series of meetings were organized in Tarragona (2003), and Sevilla (2004 – 2008). After the first BWMC, a special issue of Natural Computing – volume 2, number 3, 2003, and a special issue of New Generation Computing – volume 22, number 4, 2004, were published; papers from the second BWMC have appeared in a special issue of Journal of Universal Computer Science – volume 10, number 5, 2004, as well as in a special issue of Soft Computing – volume 9, number 5, 2005; a selection of papers written during the third BWMC has appeared in a special issue of International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science – volume 17, number 1, 2006); after the fourth BWMC a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science was edited – volume 372, numbers 2-3, 2007; after the fifth edition, a special issue of International Journal of Unconventional Computing was edited – volume 5, number 5, 2009; finally, a selection of papers elaborated during the sixth BWMC has appeared in a special issue of Fundamenta Informatica

The Turing Guide

This volume celebrates the various facets of Alan Turing (1912–1954), the British mathematician and computing pioneer, widely considered as the father of computer science. It is aimed at the general reader, with additional notes and references for those who wish to explore the life and work of Turing more deeply. The book is divided into eight parts, covering different aspects of Turing’s life and work. Part I presents various biographical aspects of Turing, some from a personal point of view. Part II presents Turing’s universal machine (now known as a Turing machine), which provides a theoretical framework for reasoning about computation. His 1936 paper on this subject is widely seen as providing the starting point for the field of theoretical computer science. Part III presents Turing’s working on codebreaking during World War II. While the War was a disastrous interlude for many, for Turing it provided a nationally important outlet for his creative genius. It is not an overstatement to say that without Turing, the War would probably have lasted longer, and may even have been lost by the Allies. The sensitive nature of Turning’s wartime work meant that much of this has been revealed only relatively recently. Part IV presents Turing’s post-War work on computing, both at the National Physical Laboratory and at the University of Manchester. He made contributions to both hardware design, through the ACE computer at the NPL, and software, especially at Manchester. Part V covers Turing’s contribution to machine intelligence (now known as Artificial Intelligence or AI). Although Turing did not coin the term, he can be considered a founder of this field which is still active today, authoring a seminal paper in 1950. Part VI covers morphogenesis, Turing’s last major scientific contribution, on the generation of seemingly random patterns in biology and on the mathematics behind such patterns. Interest in this area has increased rapidly in recent times in the field of bioinformatics, with Turing’s 1952 paper on this subject being frequently cited. Part VII presents some of Turing’s mathematical influences and achievements. Turing was remarkably free of external influences, with few co-authors – Max Newman was an exception and acted as a mathematical mentor in both Cambridge and Manchester. Part VIII considers Turing in a wider context, including his influence and legacy to science and in the public consciousness. Reflecting Turing’s wide influence, the book includes contributions by authors from a wide variety of backgrounds. Contemporaries provide reminiscences, while there are perspectives by philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, historians of science, and museum curators. Some of the contributors gave presentations at Turing Centenary meetings in 2012 in Bletchley Park, King’s College Cambridge, and Oxford University, and several of the chapters in this volume are based on those presentations – some through transcription of the original talks, especially for Turing’s contemporaries, now aged in their 90s. Sadly, some contributors died before the publication of this book, hence its dedication to them. For those interested in personal recollections, Chapters 2, 3, 11, 12, 16, 17, and 36 will be of interest. For philosophical aspects of Turing’s work, see Chapters 6, 7, 26–31, and 41. Mathematical perspectives can be found in Chapters 35 and 37–39. Historical perspectives can be found in Chapters 4, 8, 9, 10, 13–15, 18, 19, 21–25, 34, and 40. With respect to Turing’s body of work, the treatment in Parts II–VI is broadly chronological. We have attempted to be comprehensive with respect to all the important aspects of Turing’s achievements, and the book can be read cover to cover, or the chapters can be tackled individually if desired. There are cross-references between chapters where appropriate, and some chapters will inevitably overlap. We hope that you enjoy this volume as part of your library and that you will dip into it whenever you wish to enter the multifaceted world of Alan Turing

A Survey on Continuous Time Computations

We provide an overview of theories of continuous time computation. These theories allow us to understand both the hardness of questions related to continuous time dynamical systems and the computational power of continuous time analog models. We survey the existing models, summarizing results, and point to relevant references in the literature

Logical Specification and Analysis of Fault Tolerant Systems through Partial Model Checking

This paper presents a framework for a logical characterisation of fault tolerance and its formal analysis based on partial model checking techniques. The framework requires a fault tolerant system to be modelled using a formal calculus, here the CCS process algebra. To this aim we propose a uniform modelling scheme in which to specify a formal model of the system, its failing behaviour and possibly its fault-recovering procedures. Once a formal model is provided into our scheme, fault tolerance - with respect to a given property - can be formalized as an equational µ-calculus formula. This formula expresses in a logic formalism, all the fault scenarios satisfying that fault tolerance property. Such a characterisation understands the analysis of fault tolerance as a form of analysis of open systems and thank to partial model checking strategies, it can be made independent on any particular fault assumption. Moreover this logical characterisation makes possible the fault-tolerance verification problem be expressed as a general µ-calculus validation problem, for solving which many theorem proof techniques and tools are available. We present several analysis methods showing the flexibility of our approach

Benchmarks for Parity Games (extended version)

We propose a benchmark suite for parity games that includes all benchmarks that have been used in the literature, and make it available online. We give an overview of the parity games, including a description of how they have been generated. We also describe structural properties of parity games, and using these properties we show that our benchmarks are representative. With this work we provide a starting point for further experimentation with parity games.Comment: The corresponding tool and benchmarks are available from https://github.com/jkeiren/paritygame-generator. This is an extended version of the paper that has been accepted for FSEN 201