Converting two-way nondeterministic unary automata into simpler automata

AbstractWe show that, on inputs of length exceeding 5n2, any n-state unary two-way nondeterministic finite automaton (2nfa) can be simulated by a (2n+2)-state quasi-sweeping 2nfa. Such a result, besides providing a “normal form” for 2nfa's, enables us to get a subexponential simulation of unary 2nfa's by two-way deterministic finite automata (2dfa's). In fact, we prove that any n-state unary 2nfa can be simulated by a sweeping 2dfa with O(n⌈log2(n+1)+3⌉) states

Untwisting two-way transducers in elementary time

Functional transductions realized by two-way transducers (equivalently, by streaming transducers and by MSO transductions) are the natural and standard notion of ``regular'' mappings from words to words. It was shown recently (LICS'13) that it is decidable if such a transduction can be implemented by some one-way transducer, but the given algorithm has non-elementary complexity. We provide an algorithm of different flavor solving the above question, that has double exponential space complexity. We further apply our technique to decide whether the transduction realized by a two-way transducer can be implemented by a sweeping transducer, with either known or unknown number of passes

One-way definability of two-way word transducers

Functional transductions realized by two-way transducers (or, equally, by streaming transducers or MSO transductions) are the natural and standard notion of `regular' mappings from words to words. It was shown in 2013 that it is decidable if such a transduction can be implemented by some one-way transducer, but the given algorithm has non-elementary complexity. We provide an algorithm of different flavor solving the above question, that has doubly exponential space complexity. In the special case of sweeping transducers the complexity is one exponential less. We also show how to construct an equivalent one-way transducer, whenever it exists, in doubly or triply exponential time, again depending on whether the input transducer is sweeping or two-way. In the sweeping case our construction is shown to be optimal