scholarly journals IT IS NL-COMPLETE TO DECIDE WHETHER A HAIRPIN COMPLETION OF REGULAR LANGUAGES IS REGULAR

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (08) ◽  
pp. 1813-1828 ◽  
Author(s):  
VOLKER DIEKERT ◽  
STEFFEN KOPECKI

The hairpin completion is an operation on formal languages which is inspired by the hairpin formation in biochemistry. Hairpin formations occur naturally within DNA-computing. It has been known that the hairpin completion of a regular language is linear context-free, but not regular, in general. However, for some time it is was open whether the regularity of the hairpin completion of a regular language is decidable. In 2009 this decidability problem has been solved positively in [5] by providing a polynomial time algorithm. In this paper we improve the complexity bound by showing that the decision problem is actually NL-complete. This complexity bound holds for both, the one-sided and the two-sided hairpin completions.

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (07) ◽  
pp. 1067-1082 ◽  
Author(s):  
YO-SUB HAN ◽  
SANG-KI KO ◽  
KAI SALOMAA

The edit-distance between two strings is the smallest number of operations required to transform one string into the other. The distance between languages L1and L2is the smallest edit-distance between string wi∈ Li, i = 1, 2. We consider the problem of computing the edit-distance of a given regular language and a given context-free language. First, we present an algorithm that finds for the languages an optimal alignment, that is, a sequence of edit operations that transforms a string in one language to a string in the other. The length of the optimal alignment, in the worst case, is exponential in the size of the given grammar and finite automaton. Then, we investigate the problem of computing only the edit-distance of the languages without explicitly producing an optimal alignment. We design a polynomial time algorithm that calculates the edit-distance based on unary homomorphisms.


2012 ◽  
Vol 23 (01) ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
ZOLTÁN ÉSIK

It is known that an ordinal is the order type of the lexicographic ordering of a regular language if and only if it is less than ωω. We design a polynomial time algorithm that constructs, for each well-ordered regular language L with respect to the lexicographic ordering, given by a deterministic finite automaton, the Cantor Normal Form of its order type. It follows that there is a polynomial time algorithm to decide whether two deterministic finite automata accepting well-ordered regular languages accept isomorphic languages. We also give estimates on the state complexity of the smallest "ordinal automaton" representing an ordinal less than ωω, together with an algorithm that translates each such ordinal to an automaton.


2006 ◽  
Vol 17 (02) ◽  
pp. 379-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
YO-SUB HAN ◽  
YAJUN WANG ◽  
DERICK WOOD

We study infix-free regular languages. We observe the structural properties of finite-state automata for infix-free languages and develop a polynomial-time algorithm to determine infix-freeness of a regular language using state-pair graphs. We consider two cases: 1) A language is specified by a nondeterministic finite-state automaton and 2) a language is specified by a regular expression. Furthermore, we examine the prime infix-free decomposition of infix-free regular languages and design an algorithm for the infix-free primality test of an infix-free regular language. Moreover, we show that we can compute the prime infix-free decomposition in polynomial time. We also demonstrate that the prime infix-free decomposition is not unique.


2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (03) ◽  
pp. 717-727
Author(s):  
BALA RAVIKUMAR

For a string w ∈ {0,1, 2,…, d-1}*, let vald(w) denote the integer whose base d representation is the string w and let MSDd(x) denote the most significant or the leading digit of a positive integer x when x is written as a base d integer. Hirvensalo and Karhumäki [9] studied the problem of computing the leading digit in the ternary representation of 2x ans showed that this problem has a polynomial time algorithm. In [16], some applications are presented for the problem of computing the leading digit of AB for given inputs A and B. In this paper, we study this problem from a formal language point of view. Formally, we consider the language Lb,d,j = {w|w ∈ {0,1, 2,…, d-1}*, 1 ≤ j ≤ 9, MSDb(dvalb(w))) = j} (and some related classes of languages) and address the question of whether this and some related languages are context-free. Standard pumping lemma proofs seem to be very difficult for these languages. We present a unified and simple combinatorial technique that shows that these languages are not unambiguous context-free languages. The Benford-Newcomb distribution plays a central role in our proofs.


2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (05) ◽  
pp. 1197-1209 ◽  
Author(s):  
YO-SUB HAN ◽  
KAI SALOMAA

Solid codes have a nice property called synchronization property, which is useful in data transmission. The property is derived from infix-freeness and overlap-freeness of solid codes. Since a code is a language, we look at solid codes from formal language viewpoint. In particular, we study regular solid codes (that are solid codes and regular). We first tackle the solid code decidability problem for regular languages and propose a polynomial time algorithm. We, then, investigate the decidability of the overlap-freeness property and show that it is decidable for regular languages but is undecidable for context-free languages. Then, we study the prime solid code decomposition of regular solid codes and propose an efficient algorithm for the prime solid code decomposition problem. We also demonstrate that a solid code does not always have a unique prime solid code decomposition.


2004 ◽  
Vol 02 (01) ◽  
pp. 173-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAN GUSFIELD ◽  
SATISH EDDHU ◽  
CHARLES LANGLEY

A phylogenetic network is a generalization of a phylogenetic tree, allowing structural properties that are not tree-like. In a seminal paper, Wang et al.1 studied the problem of constructing a phylogenetic network, allowing recombination between sequences, with the constraint that the resulting cycles must be disjoint. We call such a phylogenetic network a "galled-tree". They gave a polynomial-time algorithm that was intended to determine whether or not a set of sequences could be generated on galled-tree. Unfortunately, the algorithm by Wang et al.1 is incomplete and does not constitute a necessary test for the existence of a galled-tree for the data. In this paper, we completely solve the problem. Moreover, we prove that if there is a galled-tree, then the one produced by our algorithm minimizes the number of recombinations over all phylogenetic networks for the data, even allowing multiple-crossover recombinations. We also prove that when there is a galled-tree for the data, the galled-tree minimizing the number of recombinations is "essentially unique". We also note two additional results: first, any set of sequences that can be derived on a galled tree can be derived on a true tree (without recombination cycles), where at most one back mutation per site is allowed; second, the site compatibility problem (which is NP-hard in general) can be solved in polynomial time for any set of sequences that can be derived on a galled tree. Perhaps more important than the specific results about galled-trees, we introduce an approach that can be used to study recombination in general phylogenetic networks. This paper greatly extends the conference version that appears in an earlier work.8 PowerPoint slides of the conference talk can be found at our website.7


1997 ◽  
Vol 134 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivek Gore ◽  
Mark Jerrum ◽  
Sampath Kannan ◽  
Z. Sweedyk ◽  
Steve Mahaney

10.29007/v68w ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Zhu ◽  
Mirek Truszczynski

We study the problem of learning the importance of preferences in preference profiles in two important cases: when individual preferences are aggregated by the ranked Pareto rule, and when they are aggregated by positional scoring rules. For the ranked Pareto rule, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a ranking of preferences such that the ranked profile correctly decides all the examples, whenever such a ranking exists. We also show that the problem to learn a ranking maximizing the number of correctly decided examples (also under the ranked Pareto rule) is NP-hard. We obtain similar results for the case of weighted profiles when positional scoring rules are used for aggregation.


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