35 research outputs found
Automata with Nested Pebbles Capture First-Order Logic with Transitive Closure
String languages recognizable in (deterministic) log-space are characterized
either by two-way (deterministic) multi-head automata, or following Immerman,
by first-order logic with (deterministic) transitive closure. Here we elaborate
this result, and match the number of heads to the arity of the transitive
closure. More precisely, first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive
closure has the same power as deterministic automata walking on their input
with k heads, additionally using a finite set of nested pebbles. This result is
valid for strings, ordered trees, and in general for families of graphs having
a fixed automaton that can be used to traverse the nodes of each of the graphs
in the family. Other examples of such families are grids, toruses, and
rectangular mazes. For nondeterministic automata, the logic is restricted to
positive occurrences of transitive closure.
The special case of k=1 for trees, shows that single-head deterministic
tree-walking automata with nested pebbles are characterized by first-order
logic with unary deterministic transitive closure. This refines our earlier
result that placed these automata between first-order and monadic second-order
logic on trees.Comment: Paper for Logical Methods in Computer Science, 27 pages, 1 figur
Pebble alternating tree-walking automata and their recognizing power
Pebble tree-walking automata with alternation were first investigated by Milo, Suciu and Vianu (2003), who showed that tree languages recognized by these devices are exactly the regular tree languages. We strengthen this by proving the same result for pebble automata with "strong pebble handling" which means that pebbles can be lifted independently of the position of the reading head and without moving the reading head. Then we make a comparison among some restricted versions of these automata. We will show that the deterministic and non-looping pebble alternating tree-walking automata are strictly less powerful than their nondeterministic counterparts, i.e., they do not recognize all the regular tree languages. Moreover, there is a proper hierarchy of recognizing capacity of deterministic and non-looping n-pebble alternating tree-walking automata with respect to the number of pebbles, i.e., for each n ≥ 0, deterministic and non-looping (n+1)-pebble alternating tree-walking automata are more powerful than their n-pebble counterparts
Deterministic Real-Time Tree-Walking-Storage Automata
We study deterministic tree-walking-storage automata, which are finite-state
devices equipped with a tree-like storage. These automata are generalized stack
automata, where the linear stack storage is replaced by a non-linear tree-like
stack. Therefore, tree-walking-storage automata have the ability to explore the
interior of the tree storage without altering the contents, with the possible
moves of the tree pointer corresponding to those of tree-walking automata. In
addition, a tree-walking-storage automaton can append (push) non-existent
descendants to a tree node and remove (pop) leaves from the tree. Here we are
particularly considering the capacities of deterministic tree-walking-storage
automata working in real time. It is shown that even the non-erasing variant
can accept rather complicated unary languages as, for example, the language of
words whose lengths are powers of two, or the language of words whose lengths
are Fibonacci numbers. Comparing the computational capacities with automata
from the classical automata hierarchy, we derive that the families of languages
accepted by real-time deterministic (non-erasing) tree-walking-storage automata
is located between the regular and the deterministic context-sensitive
languages. There is a context-free language that is not accepted by any
real-time deterministic tree-walking-storage automaton. On the other hand,
these devices accept a unary language in non-erasing mode that cannot be
accepted by any classical stack automaton, even in erasing mode and arbitrary
time. Basic closure properties of the induced families of languages are shown.
In particular, we consider Boolean operations (complementation, union,
intersection) and AFL operations (union, intersection with regular languages,
homomorphism, inverse homomorphism, concatenation, iteration). It turns out
that the two families in question have the same properties and, in particular,
share all but one of these closure properties with the important family of
deterministic context-free languages.Comment: In Proceedings NCMA 2023, arXiv:2309.0733
Playing Games in the Baire Space
We solve a generalized version of Church's Synthesis Problem where a play is
given by a sequence of natural numbers rather than a sequence of bits; so a
play is an element of the Baire space rather than of the Cantor space. Two
players Input and Output choose natural numbers in alternation to generate a
play. We present a natural model of automata ("N-memory automata") equipped
with the parity acceptance condition, and we introduce also the corresponding
model of "N-memory transducers". We show that solvability of games specified by
N-memory automata (i.e., existence of a winning strategy for player Output) is
decidable, and that in this case an N-memory transducer can be constructed that
implements a winning strategy for player Output.Comment: In Proceedings Cassting'16/SynCoP'16, arXiv:1608.0017
Deciding determinism of caterpillar expressions
AbstractCaterpillar expressions have been introduced by Brüggemann-Klein and Wood for applications in markup languages. Caterpillar expressions provide a convenient formalism for specifying the operation of tree-walking automata on unranked trees. Here we give a formal definition of determinism of caterpillar expressions that is based on the language of instruction sequences defined by the expression. We show that determinism of caterpillar expressions can be decided in polynomial time