Decidability of regular language genus computation

DOI10.1017/S0960129519000057MaRDI QIDQ5108538zbMATH OpenWikidataFDO

Authors Guillaume Bonfante, Florian Deloup

Publication date 4 May 2020

Published in Mathematical Structures in Computer Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.09405

zbMATH Keywords

deterministic finite automatongraph embeddingplanarityregular languagetopological genus

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Planar graphs; geometric and topological aspects of graph theory (05C10) Formal languages and automata (68Q45)

Abstract: The article continues the study of the genus of regular languages that the authors introduced in a 2012 paper. Generalizing a previous result, we produce a new family of regular languages on a two-letter alphabet having arbitrary high genus. Let $L$ be a regular language. In order to understand the genus $g(L)$ of $L$, we introduce the topological size of $|L{|}_{mtop}$ to be the minimal size of all finite deterministic automata of genus $g(L)$ computing $L$. We show that the minimal finite deterministic automaton of a regular language can be arbitrary far away from a finite deterministic automaton realizing the minimal genus and computing the same language, both in terms of the difference of genera and in terms of the difference in size. In particular, we show that the topological size $|L{|}_{mtop}$ can grow at least exponentially in size $|L|$. We conjecture however the genus of every regular language to be computable. This conjecture implies in particular that the planarity of a regular language is decidable, a question asked in 1976 by R.V. Book and A.K. Chandra. We prove here the conjecture for a fairly generic class of regular languages having no short cycles.

Recommendations

• The genus of regular languages
• Decidability of geometricity of regular languages
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1936756
• Deciding definability by deterministic regular expressions
• A note on decidability of cellularity

Cites work

• Elements of automata theory. Translated from the French by Reuben Thomas
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3497806 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1256757 (Why is no real title available?)
• Inherently nonplanar automata
• The genus of regular languages
• Topological graph theory.

Cited in

(2)

• The genus of regular languages
• The genus of regular languages and directed graph emulators

This page was built for publication: Decidability of regular language genus computation

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q5108538)