No Arabic abstract
We present an underapproximation for context-free languages by filtering out runs of the underlying pushdown automaton depending on how the stack height evolves over time. In particular, we assign to each run a number quantifying the oscillating behavior of the stack along the run. We study languages accepted by pushdown automata restricted to k-oscillating runs. We relate oscillation on pushdown automata with a counterpart restriction on context-free grammars. We also provide a way to filter all but the k-oscillating runs from a given PDA by annotating stack symbols with information about the oscillation. Finally, we study closure properties of the defined class of languages and the complexity of the k-emptiness problem asking, given a pushdown automaton P and k >= 0, whether P has a k-oscillating run. We show that, when k is not part of the input, the k-emptiness problem is NLOGSPACE-complete.
We introduce the notion of adaptive synchronisation for pushdown automata, in which there is an external observer who has no knowledge about the current state of the pushdown automaton, but can observe the contents of the stack. The observer would then like to decide if it is possible to bring the automaton from any state into some predetermined state by giving inputs to it in an emph{adaptive} manner, i.e., the next input letter to be given can depend on how the contents of the stack changed after the current input letter. We show that for non-deterministic pushdown automata, this problem is 2-EXPTIME-complete and for deterministic pushdown automata, we show EXPTIME-completeness. To prove the lower bounds, we first introduce (different variants of) subset-synchronisation and show that these problems are polynomial-time equivalent with the adaptive synchronisation problem. We then prove hardness results for the subset-synchronisation problems. For proving the upper bounds, we consider the problem of deciding if a given alternating pushdown system has an accepting run with at most $k$ leaves and we provide an $n^{O(k^2)}$ time algorithm for this problem.
We study the expressiveness and succinctness of good-for-games pushdown automata (GFG-PDA) over finite words, that is, pushdown automata whose nondeterminism can be resolved based on the run constructed so far, but independently of the remainder of the input word. We prove that GFG-PDA recognise more languages than deterministic PDA (DPDA) but not all context-free languages (CFL). This class is orthogonal to unambiguous CFL. We further show that GFG-PDA can be exponentially more succinct than DPDA, while PDA can be double-exponentially more succinct than GFG-PDA. We also study GFGness in visibly pushdown automata (VPA), which enjoy better closure properties than PDA, and for which we show GFGness to be EXPTIME-complete. GFG-VPA can be exponentially more succinct than deterministic VPA, while VPA can be exponentially more succinct than GFG-VPA. Both of these lower bounds are tight. Finally, we study the complexity of resolving nondeterminism in GFG-PDA. Every GFG-PDA has a positional resolver, a function that resolves nondeterminism and that is only dependant on the current configuration. Pushdown transducers are sufficient to implement the resolvers of GFG-VPA, but not those of GFG-PDA. GFG-PDA with finite-state resolvers are determinisable.
In this note we study automata recognizing birecurrent sets. A set of words is birecurrent if the minimal partial DFA recognizing this set and the minimal partial DFA recognizing the reversal of this set are both strongly connected. This notion was introduced by Perrin, and Dolce et al. provided a characterization of such sets. We prove that deciding whether a partial DFA recognizes a birecurrent set is a PSPACE-complete problem. We show that this problem is PSPACE-complete even in the case of binary partial DFAs with all states accepting and in the case of binary complete DFAs. We also consider a related problem of computing the rank of a partial DFA.
The paper proposes a simple formalism for dealing with deterministic, non-deterministic and stochastic cellular automata in a unifying and composable manner. Armed with this formalism, we extend the notion of intrinsic simulation between deterministic cellular automata, to the non-deterministic and stochastic settings. We then provide explicit tools to prove or disprove the existence of such a simulation between two stochastic cellular automata, even though the intrinsic simulation relation is shown to be undecidable in dimension two and higher. The key result behind this is the caracterization of equality of stochastic global maps by the existence of a coupling between the random sources. We then prove that there is a universal non-deterministic cellular automaton, but no universal stochastic cellular automaton. Yet we provide stochastic cellular automata achieving optimal partial universality.
The potential of the exact quantum information processing is an interesting, important and intriguing issue. For examples, it has been believed that quantum tools can provide significant, that is larger than polynomial, advantages in the case of exact quantum computation only, or mainly, for problems with very special structures. We will show that this is not the case. In this paper the potential of quantum finite automata producing outcomes not only with a (high) probability, but with certainty (so called exactly) is explored in the context of their uses for solving promise problems and with respect to the size of automata. It is shown that for solving particular classes ${A^n}_{n=1}^{infty}$ of promise problems, even those without some very special structure, that succinctness of the exact quantum finite automata under consideration, with respect to the number of (basis) states, can be very small (and constant) though it grows proportional to $n$ in the case deterministic finite automata (DFAs) of the same power are used. This is here demonstrated also for the case that the component languages of the promise problems solvable by DFAs are non-regular. The method used can be applied in finding more exact quantum finite automata or quantum algorithms for other promise problems.