Alternating real-time computations (Q1111386)

The effect of the number of work tapes on computational power of real- time Turing machines is considered. Well known results state that k tapes are better than k-1 tapes in the case of deterministic machines and, for nondeterministic ones, two tapes are as good as many tapes. We show that alternating real-time pushdown automata recognize the same class of languages as multitape alternating machines working in linear time. It is also shown that the automata making a constant number of alternations and only one reversal recognize exactly rudimentary languages.