Journal article

Tight Bounds for Cut-Operations on Deterministic Finite Automata


Authors listDrewes, Frank; Holzer, Markus; Jakobi, Sebastian; van der Merwe, Brink

Publication year2017

Pages89-110

JournalFundamenta Informaticae

Volume number155

Issue number1-2

ISSN0169-2968

eISSN1875-8681

DOI Linkhttps://doi.org/10.3233/FI-2017-1577

PublisherSAGE Publications


Abstract
We investigate the state complexity of the cut and iterated cut operation for deterministic finite automata (DFAs), answering an open question stated in [M. BERGLUND, et al.: Cuts in regular expressions. In Proc. DLT, LNCS 7907, 2011]. These operations can be seen as an alternative to ordinary concatenation and Kleene star modelling leftmost maximal string matching. We show that the cut operation has a matching upper and lower bound of n states, if m = 1, and (n = 1) . m + n states, otherwise, on DFAs accepting the cut of two individual languages that are accepted by n- and m-state DFAs, respectively. In the unary case we obtain m a x (2n - 1; m + n - 2) states as a tight bound-notice that for m <= n the bound for unary DFAs only depends on the former automaton and not on the latter. For accepting the iterated cut of a language accepted by an n -state DFA we find a matching bound of 1 + (n + 1) . F (1; n + 2; n + 2; n + 1 | -1) states on DFAs, if n >= 4 and where F refers to the generalized hypergeometric function. This bound is in the order of magnitude circle minus ((n - 1) !). Finally, the bound drops to 2n - 1 for unary DFAs accepting the iterated cut of an n -state DFA, if n >= 3, and thus is similar to the bound for the cut operation on unary DFAs.


Citation Styles

Harvard Citation styleDrewes, F., Holzer, M., Jakobi, S. and van der Merwe, B. (2017) Tight Bounds for Cut-Operations on Deterministic Finite Automata, Fundamenta Informaticae, 155(1-2), pp. 89-110. https://doi.org/10.3233/FI-2017-1577

APA Citation styleDrewes, F., Holzer, M., Jakobi, S., & van der Merwe, B. (2017). Tight Bounds for Cut-Operations on Deterministic Finite Automata. Fundamenta Informaticae. 155(1-2), 89-110. https://doi.org/10.3233/FI-2017-1577



Keywords


cut and iterated cut operationDESCRIPTIONAL COMPLEXITYFINITE AUTOMATA

Last updated on 2025-02-04 at 01:30