scholarly journals Nondeterministic Syntactic Complexity

Author(s):  
Robert S. R. Myers ◽  
Stefan Milius ◽  
Henning Urbat

AbstractWe introduce a new measure on regular languages: their nondeterministic syntactic complexity. It is the least degree of any extension of the ‘canonical boolean representation’ of the syntactic monoid. Equivalently, it is the least number of states of any subatomic nondeterministic acceptor. It turns out that essentially all previous structural work on nondeterministic state-minimality computes this measure. Our approach rests on an algebraic interpretation of nondeterministic finite automata as deterministic finite automata endowed with semilattice structure. Crucially, the latter form a self-dual category.

2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (05) ◽  
pp. 975-984 ◽  
Author(s):  
HING LEUNG

In this paper, we study the tradeoffs in descriptional complexity of NFA (nondeterministic finite automata) of various amounts of ambiguity. We say that two classes of NFA are separated if one class can be exponentially more succinct in descriptional sizes than the other. New results are given for separating DFA (deterministic finite automata) from UFA (unambiguous finite automata), UFA from MDFA (DFA with multiple initial states) and UFA from FNA (finitely ambiguous NFA). We present a family of regular languages that we conjecture to be a good candidate for separating FNA from LNA (linearly ambiguous NFA).


Computability ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Merlin Carl

An important theorem in classical complexity theory is that REG = LOGLOGSPACE, i.e., that languages decidable with double-logarithmic space bound are regular. We consider a transfinite analogue of this theorem. To this end, we introduce deterministic ordinal automata (DOAs) and show that they satisfy many of the basic statements of the theory of deterministic finite automata and regular languages. We then consider languages decidable by an ordinal Turing machine (OTM), introduced by P. Koepke in 2005 and show that if the working space of an OTM is of strictly smaller cardinality than the input length for all sufficiently long inputs, the language so decided is also decidable by a DOA, which is a transfinite analogue of LOGLOGSPACE ⊆ REG; the other direction, however, is easily seen to fail.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (01) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michal Hospodár ◽  
Galina Jirásková ◽  
Peter Mlynárčik

We examine the descriptional complexity of the forever operator, which assigns the language [Formula: see text] to a regular language [Formula: see text], and we investigate the trade-offs between various models of finite automata. We consider complete and partial deterministic finite automata, nondeterministic finite automata with single or multiple initial states, alternating, and Boolean finite automata. We assume that the argument and the result of this operation are accepted by automata belonging to one of these six models. We investigate all possible trade-offs and provide a tight upper bound for 32 of 36 of them. The most interesting result is the trade-off from nondeterministic to deterministic automata given by the Dedekind number [Formula: see text]. We also prove that the nondeterministic state complexity of [Formula: see text] is [Formula: see text] which solves an open problem stated by Birget [The state complexity of [Formula: see text] and its connection with temporal logic, Inform. Process. Lett. 58 (1996) 185–188].


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (06) ◽  
pp. 1207-1225 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREAS MALETTI ◽  
DANIEL QUERNHEIM

Hyper-minimization of deterministic finite automata (DFA) is a recently introduced state reduction technique that allows a finite change in the recognized language. A generalization of this lossy compression method to the weighted setting over semifields is presented, which allows the recognized weighted language to differ for finitely many input strings. First, the structure of hyper-minimal deterministic weighted finite automata is characterized in a similar way as in classical weighted minimization and unweighted hyper-minimization. Second, an efficient hyper-minimization algorithm, which runs in time [Formula: see text], is derived from this characterization. Third, the closure properties of canonical regular languages, which are languages recognized by hyper-minimal DFA, are investigated. Finally, some recent results in the area of hyper-minimization are recalled.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 263-279
Author(s):  
Henning Bordihn ◽  
György Vaszil

AbstractWe study the concept of reversibility in connection with parallel communicating systems of finite automata (PCFA in short). We define the notion of reversibility in the case of PCFA (also covering the non-deterministic case) and discuss the relationship of the reversibility of the systems and the reversibility of its components. We show that a system can be reversible with non-reversible components, and the other way around, the reversibility of the components does not necessarily imply the reversibility of the system as a whole. We also investigate the computational power of deterministic centralized reversible PCFA. We show that these very simple types of PCFA (returning or non-returning) can recognize regular languages which cannot be accepted by reversible (deterministic) finite automata, and that they can even accept languages that are not context-free. We also separate the deterministic and non-deterministic variants in the case of systems with non-returning communication. We show that there are languages accepted by non-deterministic centralized PCFA, which cannot be recognized by any deterministic variant of the same type.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (05) ◽  
pp. 503-522
Author(s):  
Holger Bock Axelsen ◽  
Markus Holzer ◽  
Martin Kutrib

Recently, a method to decide the NL-complete problem of whether the language accepted by a given deterministic finite automaton (DFA) can also be accepted by some reversible deterministic finite automaton (REV-DFA) has been derived. Here, we show that the corresponding problem for nondeterministic finite automata (NFA) is PSPACE-complete. The recent DFA method essentially works by minimizing the DFA and inspecting it for a forbidden pattern. We here study the degree of irreversibility for a regular language, the minimal number of such forbidden patterns necessary in any DFA accepting the language, and show that the degree induces a strict infinite hierarchy of language families. We examine how the degree of irreversibility behaves under the usual language operations union, intersection, complement, concatenation, and Kleene star, showing tight bounds (some asymptotically) on the degree.


1977 ◽  
Vol 6 (82) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Meineche Schmidt

<p>The gain in succinctness of descriptions of regular languages when nondeterministic (unambiguous) finite automata are used rather than unambiguous (deterministic) finite automata, is not bounded by any polynomium.</p><p>The problem of deciding whether an unambiguous regular expression does not generate all words over its terminal alphabet, is in NP.</p>


2009 ◽  
Vol 20 (04) ◽  
pp. 563-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARKUS HOLZER ◽  
MARTIN KUTRIB

Nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) were introduced in [68], where their equivalence to deterministic finite automata was shown. Over the last 50 years, a vast literature documenting the importance of finite automata as an enormously valuable concept has been developed. In the present paper, we tour a fragment of this literature. Mostly, we discuss recent developments relevant to NFAs related problems like, for example, (i) simulation of and by several types of finite automata, (ii) minimization and approximation, (iii) size estimation of minimal NFAs, and (iv) state complexity of language operations. We thus come across descriptional and computational complexity issues of nondeterministic finite automata. We do not prove these results but we merely draw attention to the big picture and some of the main ideas involved.


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