538 research outputs found
Review of Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature by Michael K. Walonen
Review of Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature by Michael K. Walone
The submonoid and rational subset membership problems for graph groups
We show that the membership problem in a finitely generated submonoid of a
graph group (also called a right-angled Artin group or a free partially
commutative group) is decidable if and only if the independence graph
(commutation graph) is a transitive forest. As a consequence we obtain the
first example of a finitely presented group with a decidable generalized word
problem that does not have a decidable membership problem for finitely
generated submonoids. We also show that the rational subset membership problem
is decidable for a graph group if and only if the independence graph is a
transitive forest, answering a question of Kambites, Silva, and the second
author. Finally we prove that for certain amalgamated free products and
HNN-extensions the rational subset and submonoid membership problems are
recursively equivalent. In particular, this applies to finitely generated
groups with two or more ends that are either torsion-free or residually finite
Submonoids and rational subsets of groups with infinitely many ends
In this paper we show that the membership problems for finitely generated
submonoids and for rational subsets are recursively equivalent for groups with
two or more ends
Branching-time model checking of one-counter processes
One-counter processes (OCPs) are pushdown processes which operate only on a
unary stack alphabet. We study the computational complexity of model checking
computation tree logic (CTL) over OCPs. A PSPACE upper bound is inherited from
the modal mu-calculus for this problem. First, we analyze the periodic
behaviour of CTL over OCPs and derive a model checking algorithm whose running
time is exponential only in the number of control locations and a syntactic
notion of the formula that we call leftward until depth. Thus, model checking
fixed OCPs against CTL formulas with a fixed leftward until depth is in P. This
generalizes a result of the first author, Mayr, and To for the expression
complexity of CTL's fragment EF. Second, we prove that already over some fixed
OCP, CTL model checking is PSPACE-hard. Third, we show that there already
exists a fixed CTL formula for which model checking of OCPs is PSPACE-hard. To
obtain the latter result, we employ two results from complexity theory: (i)
Converting a natural number in Chinese remainder presentation into binary
presentation is in logspace-uniform NC^1 and (ii) PSPACE is AC^0-serializable.
We demonstrate that our approach can be used to obtain further results. We show
that model-checking CTL's fragment EF over OCPs is hard for P^NP, thus
establishing a matching lower bound and answering an open question of the first
author, Mayr, and To. We moreover show that the following problem is hard for
PSPACE: Given a one-counter Markov decision process, a set of target states
with counter value zero each, and an initial state, to decide whether the
probability that the initial state will eventually reach one of the target
states is arbitrarily close to 1. This improves a previously known lower bound
for every level of the Boolean hierarchy by Brazdil et al
The Complexity of Bisimulation and Simulation on Finite Systems
In this paper the computational complexity of the (bi)simulation problem over
restricted graph classes is studied. For trees given as pointer structures or
terms the (bi)simulation problem is complete for logarithmic space or NC,
respectively. This solves an open problem from Balc\'azar, Gabarr\'o, and
S\'antha. Furthermore, if only one of the input graphs is required to be a
tree, the bisimulation (simulation) problem is contained in AC (LogCFL). In
contrast, it is also shown that the simulation problem is P-complete already
for graphs of bounded path-width
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