A large class of sofic monoids

We prove that a monoid is sofic, in the sense recently introduced by Ceccherini-Silberstein and Coornaert, whenever the J-class of the identity is a sofic group, and the quotients of this group by orbit stabilisers in the rest of the monoid are amenable. In particular, this shows that the following are all sofic: cancellative monoids with amenable group of units; monoids with sofic group of units and finitely many non-units; and monoids with amenable Schutzenberger groups and finitely many L-classes in each D-class. This provides a very wide range of sofic monoids, subsuming most known examples (with the notable exception of locally residually finite monoids). We conclude by discussing some aspects of the definition, and posing some questions for future research

Word problems recognisable by deterministic blind monoid automata

We consider blind, deterministic, finite automata equipped with a register which stores an element of a given monoid, and which is modified by right multiplication by monoid elements. We show that, for monoids M drawn from a large class including groups, such an automaton accepts the word problem of a group H if and only if H has a finite index subgroup which embeds in the group of units of M. In the case that M is a group, this answers a question of Elston and Ostheimer.Comment: 8 pages, fixed some typos and clarified ambiguity in the abstract, results unchange

Small overlap monoids II: automatic structures and normal forms

We show that any finite monoid or semigroup presentation satisfying the small overlap condition C(4) has word problem which is a deterministic rational relation. It follows that the set of lexicographically minimal words forms a regular language of normal forms, and that these normal forms can be computed in linear time. We also deduce that C(4) monoids and semigroups are rational (in the sense of Sakarovitch), asynchronous automatic, and word hyperbolic (in the sense of Duncan and Gilman). From this it follows that C(4) monoids satisfy analogues of Kleene's theorem, and admit decision algorithms for the rational subset and finitely generated submonoid membership problems. We also prove some automata-theoretic results which may be of independent interest.Comment: 17 page