From Finite Automata to Regular Expressions and Back—A Summary on Descriptional Complexity

Hermann Gruber
(knowledgepark AG)
Markus Holzer
(Universität Giessen)

The equivalence of finite automata and regular expressions dates back to the seminal paper of Kleene on events in nerve nets and finite automata from 1956. In the present paper we tour a fragment of the literature and summarize results on upper and lower bounds on the conversion of finite automata to regular expressions and vice versa. We also briefly recall the known bounds for the removal of spontaneous transitions (epsilon-transitions) on non-epsilon-free nondeterministic devices. Moreover, we report on recent results on the average case descriptional complexity bounds for the conversion of regular expressions to finite automata and brand new developments on the state elimination algorithm that converts finite automata to regular expressions.

Invited Presentation in Zoltán Ésik and Zoltán Fülöp: Proceedings 14th International Conference on Automata and Formal Languages (AFL 2014), Szeged, Hungary, May 27-29, 2014, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 151, pp. 25–48.
Published: 21st May 2014.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.151.2 bibtex PDF
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