Conjunctive grammars, introduced by Okhotin, extend context-free grammars by an additional operation of intersection in the body of any production of the grammar. Several theorems and algorithms for context-free grammars generalize to the conjunctive case. Okhotin posed nine open problems concerning those grammars. One of them was a question, whether a conjunctive grammars over a unary alphabet generate only regular languages. We give a negative answer, contrary to the conjectured positive one, by constructing a conjunctive grammar for the language {a4n : n ∈ ℕ}. We also generalize this result: for every set of natural numbers L we show that {an : n ∈ L} is a conjunctive unary language, whenever the set of representations in base-k system of elements of L is regular, for arbitrary k.
OPEN PROBLEMS ON REGULAR LANGUAGES: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
