| dc.description.abstract | The state complexity of operations on regular languages is an active area of research in
theoretical computer science. Through connections with algebra, particularly the theory
of semigroups and monoids, many problems in this area can be simplified or completely
reduced to combinatorial problems. We describe various algebraic techniques for attacking
state complexity problems. We present a general method for constructing witness languages
for operations -- languages that attain the worst-case state complexity when used as the
argument(s) of the operation. Our construction is based on full transformation monoids,
which contain all functions from a finite set into itself. When a witness for an operation is
known, determining the state complexity essentially becomes a counting problem.
These counting problems, however, are not necessarily easy, and the witness languages
produced by this method are not ideal in the sense that they have extremely large alphabets.
We thus investigate some commonly used operations in detail, and look for algebraic
techniques to simplify the combinatorial side of state complexity problems and to simplify
the search for small-alphabet witnesses. For boolean operations (e.g., union, intersection,
difference) we show that these combinatorial problems can be solved easily in special cases
by studying the subgroup of permutations in the syntactic monoid of a witness candidate.
If the subgroup of permutations is known to have some strong transitivity property, such as
primitivity or 2-transitivity, we can draw conclusions about the worst-case state complexity
when this language is used in a boolean operation. For the operations of concatenation
and Kleene star (an iterated version of concatenation), we describe a “construction set”
method to simplify state complexity lower-bound proofs, and determine some algebraic
conditions under which this method can be applied. For the reversal operation, we show
that the state complexity of the reverse of a language is closely related to the syntactic
monoid of the language, and use this fact to investigate a generalized version of the reversal
state complexity problem.
After describing our techniques, we demonstrate them by applying them to some classical
state complexity problems. We obtain complex generalizations of the classical results
that would be difficult to prove without the machinery we develop. | en |
