The equivalence of finite automata and regular expressions dates back to the
seminal paper of Kleene on events in nerve nets and finite automata from 1956.
In the present paper we tour a fragment of the literature and summarize results
on upper and lower bounds on the conversion of finite automata to regular
expressions and vice versa. We also briefly recall the known bounds for the
removal of spontaneous transitions (epsilon-transitions) on non-epsilon-free
nondeterministic devices. Moreover, we report on recent results on the average
case descriptional complexity bounds for the conversion of regular expressions
to finite automata and brand new developments on the state elimination
algorithm that converts finite automata to regular expressions.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527
