Regular languages in \(NC\) (Q1191027)

The paper deals with the problem of recognition of regular languages by the circuits of certain type. The theory of the syntactic monoid of a regular language is used to present various characterizations of the regular languages in the circuit complexity class \(AC^ 0\). Also an effective procedure for deciding the membership of a regular language in \(AC^ 0\) is given, thus answering the decidability question concerning this problem. Variants of the results concerning circuits with gates that compute the sum of the inputs modulo a fixed prime are considered as well.