Narrow Results

We investigate the descriptional complexity of operations on finite and infinite regular languages over unary and arbitrary alphabets. The languages are represented by nondeterministic finite automata (NFA). In particular, we consider Boolean operations, catenation operations – concatenation, iteration, λ-free iteration – and the reversal. Most of the shown bounds are tight in the exact number of states, i.e. the number is sufficient and necessary in the worst case. Otherwise tight bounds in the order of magnitude are shown.

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.

We continue our research on minimization problems and related problems for automata w.r.t. to different error profiles, now considering nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) as inputs. Here the error profiles are almost-equivalence and E-equivalence. We show that the minimization problems and their underlying equivalence problems become PSPACE-complete in most cases. The obtained results nicely fit to the known ones on ordinary NFA minimization, and show a significant difference to the previously obtained results on deterministic finite state machines.

We introduce the concept of one-time nondeterminism as a new kind of limited nondeterminism for finite state machines and pushdown automata. Roughly speaking, one-time nondeterminism means that at the outset the computation is nondeterministic, but whenever it performs a guess, this guess is fixed for the rest of the computation. We characterize the computational power of one-time nondeterministic finite automata (OTNFAs) and one-time nondeterministic pushdown devices. Moreover, we study the descriptional complexity of these machines. For instance, we show that for an $n$-state OTNFA with a sole nondeterministic state, that is nondeterministic for only one input symbol, ${(n+1)}^n$ states are sufficient and necessary in the worst case for an equivalent deterministic finite automaton. In case of pushdown automata, the conversion of a nondeterministic to a one-time nondeterministic as well as the conversion of a one-time nondeterministic to a deterministic one turn out to be non-recursive, that is, the trade-offs in size cannot be bounded by any recursive function.

We study the NFA reductions by invariant equivalences and preorders. It is well-known that the NFA minimization problem is PSPACE-complete. Therefore, there have been many approaches to reduce the size of NFAs in low polynomial time by computing invariant equivalence or preorder relation and merging the states within same equivalence class. Here we consider the nondeterminism reduction of NFAs by invariant equivalences and preorders. We, in particular, show that computing equivalence and preorder relation from the left is more useful than the right for reducing the degree of nondeterminism in NFAs. We also present experimental evidence for showing that NFA reduction from the left achieves the better reduction of nondeterminism than reduction from the right.

In this paper we establish the regularity of various sets of multi-accepted strings of nondeterministic finite automata. Regularity follows from the existence of accepting automata constructed by introducing a vector labeling method which generalizes the subset labeling approach. In each set the acceptance levels of the strings correspond to finite sets of additive equivalence classes of non-negative integers.