Measuring nondeterminism in pushdown automata

Abstract

The amount of nondeterminism that a pushdown automaton requires to recognize an input string can be measured by the minimum number of guesses that it must make to accept the string, where guesses are measured in bits of information. When this quantity is unbounded, the rate at which it grows as the length of the string increases serves as a measure of the pushdown automaton's “rate of consumption” of non-determinism. We show that this measure is similar to other complexity measures in that it gives rise to an infinite hierarchy of complexity classes of context-free languages differing in the amount of this resource (nondeterminism) that they require. In addition, we show that there are contextfree languages that can only be recognized by a pushdown automaton whose nondeterminism grows linearly, resolving an open problem in the literature. In particular, {ww ^R: wε {a,b}}^*} is such a language.

This author's research was supported in part by the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk under Grant No. II/62 325.