The linear-time simulation of 2-way deterministic pushdown automata (2DPDA)
by the Cook and Jones constructions is revisited. Following the semantics-based
approach by Jones, an interpreter is given which, when extended with
random-access memory, performs a linear-time simulation of 2DPDA. The recursive
interpreter works without the dump list of the original constructions, which
makes Cook's insight into linear-time simulation of exponential-time automata
more intuitive and the complexity argument clearer. The simulation is then
extended to 2-way nondeterministic pushdown automata (2NPDA) to provide for a
cubic-time recognition of context-free languages. The time required to run the
final construction depends on the degree of nondeterminism. The key mechanism
that enables the polynomial-time simulations is the sharing of computations by
memoization.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455
