Abstract
The paper determines the number of states in a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) necessary to represent “unambiguous” variants of the union, concatenation, and Kleene star operations on formal languages. For the disjoint union of languages represented by an m-state and an n-state DFA, the state complexity is \(mn-1\); for the unambiguous concatenation, it is known to be \(m2^{n-1} - 2^{n-2}\) (Daley et al. “Orthogonal concatenation: Language equations and state complexity”, J. UCS, 2010), and this paper shows that this number of states is necessary already over a binary alphabet; for the unambiguous star, the state complexity function is determined to be \(\frac{3}{8}2^n+1\). In the case of a unary alphabet, disjoint union requires up to \(\frac{1}{2}mn\) states, unambiguous concatenation has state complexity \(m+n-2\), and unambiguous star requires \(n-2\) states in the worst case.
G. Jirásková—Research supported by VEGA grant 2/0084/15 and grant APVV-15-0091.
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Jirásková, G., Okhotin, A. (2018). State Complexity of Unambiguous Operations on Deterministic Finite Automata. In: Konstantinidis, S., Pighizzini, G. (eds) Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems. DCFS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10952. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94631-3_16
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