Fundamenta Informaticae

A set of nonnegative matrices is called primitive if there exists a product of these matrices that is entrywise positive. Motivated by recent results relating synchronizing automata and primitive sets, we study the length of the shortest product of a primitive set having a column or a row with k positive entries, called its k-rendezvous time (k-RT), in the case of sets of matrices having no zero rows and no zero columns. We prove that the k-RT is at most linear w.r.t. the matrix size n for small k, while the problem is still open for synchronizing automata. We provide two upper bounds on the k-RT: the second is an improvement of the first one, although the latter can be written in closed form. We then report numerical results comparing our upper bounds on the k-RT with heuristic approximation methods.

Given a two-way finite automaton recognizing a non-empty language, consider the length of the shortest string it accepts, and, for each n ≥ 1, let f(n) be the maximum of these lengths over all n-state automata. It is proved that for n-state two-way finite automata, whether deterministic or nondeterministic, this number is at least Ω(10^n/5) and less than ( 2 n n + 1 ) , with the lower bound reached over an alphabet of size Θ(n). Furthermore, for deterministic automata and for a fixed alphabet of size m ≥ 1, the length of the shortest string is at least e ( 1 + o ( 1 ) ) m n ( log   n −   log   m ) .

We present first-order (FO) and monadic second-order (MSO) logics with predicates ‘between’ and ‘neighbour’ that characterise the class of regular languages that are closed under the reverse operation and its subclasses. The ternary between predicate bet(x, y, z) is true if the position y is strictly between the positions x and z. The binary neighbour predicate N(x, y) is true when the the positions x and y are adjacent. It is shown that the class of reversible regular languages is precisely the class definable in the logics MSO(bet) and MSO(N). Moreover the class is definable by their existential fragments EMSO(bet) and EMSO(N), yielding a normal form for MSO formulas. In the first-order case, the logic FO(bet) corresponds precisely to the class of reversible languages definable in FO(<). Every formula in FO(bet) is equivalent to one that uses at most 3 variables. However the logic FO(N) defines only a strict subset of reversible languages definable in FO(+1). A language-theoretic characterisation of the class of languages definable in FO(N), called locally-reversible threshold-testable (LRTT), is given. In the second part of the paper we show that the standard connections that exist between MSO and FO logics with order and successor predicates and varieties of finite semigroups extend to the new setting with the semigroups extended with an involution operation on its elements. The case is different for FO(N) where we show that one needs an additional equation that uses the involution operator to characterise the class. While the general problem of characterising FO(N) is open, an equational characterisation is shown for the case of neutral letter languages.

We propose a new algorithm for checking language equivalence of non-deterministic Büchi automata. We start from a construction proposed by Calbrix, Nivat and Podelski, which makes it possible to reduce the problem to that of checking equivalence of automata on finite words. Although this construction generates large and highly non-deterministic automata, we show how to exploit their specific structure and apply state-of-the art techniques based on coinduction to reduce the state-space that has to be explored. Doing so, we obtain algorithms which do not require full determinisation or complementation.

For a given language L, we study the languages X such that for all distinct words u, v ∈ L, there exists a word x ∈ X that appears a different number of times as a factor in u and in v. In particular, we are interested in the following question: For which languages L does there exist a finite language X satisfying the above condition? We answer this question for all regular languages and for all sets of factors of infinite words.