Weakly and Strongly Irreversible Regular Languages

Giovanna J. Lavado
(Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano)
Giovanni Pighizzini
(Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano)
Luca Prigioniero
(Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano)

Finite automata whose computations can be reversed, at any point, by knowing the last k symbols read from the input, for a fixed k, are considered. These devices and their accepted languages are called k-reversible automata and k-reversible languages, respectively. The existence of k-reversible languages which are not (k-1)-reversible is known, for each k>1. This gives an infinite hierarchy of weakly irreversible languages, i.e., languages which are k-reversible for some k. Conditions characterizing the class of k-reversible languages, for each fixed k, and the class of weakly irreversible languages are obtained. From these conditions, a procedure that given a finite automaton decides if the accepted language is weakly or strongly (i.e., not weakly) irreversible is described. Furthermore, a construction which allows to transform any finite automaton which is not k-reversible, but which accepts a k-reversible language, into an equivalent k-reversible finite automaton, is presented.

In Erzsébet Csuhaj-Varjú, Pál Dömösi and György Vaszil: Proceedings 15th International Conference on Automata and Formal Languages (AFL 2017), Debrecen, Hungary, September 4-6, 2017, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 252, pp. 143–156.
Published: 21st August 2017.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.252.15 bibtex PDF
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