The decidability of the genus of regular languages and directed emulators

We prove that the genus of a regular language is decidable. For this purpose, we use a graph-theoretical approach. We show that the original question is equivalent to the existence of a special kind of graph epimorphism - a directed emulator morphism -- onto the underlying graph of the minimal deterministic automaton for the regular language. We also prove that the class of directed emulators of genus less than or equal to $g$ is closed under minors. Decidability follows from the Robertson-Seymour theorem.