3,910 research outputs found
Operational State Complexity of Deterministic Unranked Tree Automata
We consider the state complexity of basic operations on tree languages
recognized by deterministic unranked tree automata. For the operations of union
and intersection the upper and lower bounds of both weakly and strongly
deterministic tree automata are obtained. For tree concatenation we establish a
tight upper bound that is of a different order than the known state complexity
of concatenation of regular string languages. We show that (n+1) (
(m+1)2^n-2^(n-1) )-1 vertical states are sufficient, and necessary in the worst
case, to recognize the concatenation of tree languages recognized by (strongly
or weakly) deterministic automata with, respectively, m and n vertical states.Comment: In Proceedings DCFS 2010, arXiv:1008.127
Complexity in Prefix-Free Regular Languages
We examine deterministic and nondeterministic state complexities of regular
operations on prefix-free languages. We strengthen several results by providing
witness languages over smaller alphabets, usually as small as possible. We next
provide the tight bounds on state complexity of symmetric difference, and
deterministic and nondeterministic state complexity of difference and cyclic
shift of prefix-free languages.Comment: In Proceedings DCFS 2010, arXiv:1008.127
History-Register Automata
Programs with dynamic allocation are able to create and use an unbounded
number of fresh resources, such as references, objects, files, etc. We propose
History-Register Automata (HRA), a new automata-theoretic formalism for
modelling such programs. HRAs extend the expressiveness of previous approaches
and bring us to the limits of decidability for reachability checks. The
distinctive feature of our machines is their use of unbounded memory sets
(histories) where input symbols can be selectively stored and compared with
symbols to follow. In addition, stored symbols can be consumed or deleted by
reset. We show that the combination of consumption and reset capabilities
renders the automata powerful enough to imitate counter machines, and yields
closure under all regular operations apart from complementation. We moreover
examine weaker notions of HRAs which strike different balances between
expressiveness and effectiveness.Comment: LMCS (improved version of FoSSaCS
A New Technique for Reachability of States in Concatenation Automata
We present a new technique for demonstrating the reachability of states in
deterministic finite automata representing the concatenation of two languages.
Such demonstrations are a necessary step in establishing the state complexity
of the concatenation of two languages, and thus in establishing the state
complexity of concatenation as an operation. Typically, ad-hoc induction
arguments are used to show particular states are reachable in concatenation
automata. We prove some results that seem to capture the essence of many of
these induction arguments. Using these results, reachability proofs in
concatenation automata can often be done more simply and without using
induction directly.Comment: 23 pages, 1 table. Added missing affiliation/funding informatio
Unary Pushdown Automata and Straight-Line Programs
We consider decision problems for deterministic pushdown automata over a
unary alphabet (udpda, for short). Udpda are a simple computation model that
accept exactly the unary regular languages, but can be exponentially more
succinct than finite-state automata. We complete the complexity landscape for
udpda by showing that emptiness (and thus universality) is P-hard, equivalence
and compressed membership problems are P-complete, and inclusion is
coNP-complete. Our upper bounds are based on a translation theorem between
udpda and straight-line programs over the binary alphabet (SLPs). We show that
the characteristic sequence of any udpda can be represented as a pair of
SLPs---one for the prefix, one for the lasso---that have size linear in the
size of the udpda and can be computed in polynomial time. Hence, decision
problems on udpda are reduced to decision problems on SLPs. Conversely, any SLP
can be converted in logarithmic space into a udpda, and this forms the basis
for our lower bound proofs. We show coNP-hardness of the ordered matching
problem for SLPs, from which we derive coNP-hardness for inclusion. In
addition, we complete the complexity landscape for unary nondeterministic
pushdown automata by showing that the universality problem is -hard, using a new class of integer expressions. Our techniques have
applications beyond udpda. We show that our results imply -completeness for a natural fragment of Presburger arithmetic and coNP lower
bounds for compressed matching problems with one-character wildcards
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