Descriptional complexity of unambiguous input-driven pushdown automata
: Alexander Okhotin, Kai Salomaa
Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
: 2015
: Theoretical Computer Science
: THEORETICAL COMPUTER SCIENCE
: THEOR COMPUT SCI
: 566
: 1
: 11
: 11
: 0304-3975
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tcs.2014.11.015(external)
It is known that a nondeterministic input-driven pushdown automaton (IDPDA) (a.k.a. visibly pushdown automaton; a.k.a. nested word automaton) with n states can be transformed to an equivalent deterministic automaton with 2(Theta(n2)) states (B. von Braunmuhl and R. Verbeek, 1983 [8]), and that this size is necessary in the worst case (R. Alur and P. Madhusudan, 2009 [4]). This paper demonstrates that the same worst-case 2(Theta(n2)) size blow-up occurs when converting a nondeterministic IDPDA to an unambiguous one, and an unambiguous IDPDA to a deterministic one. In addition, the methods developed in this paper are used to demonstrate that the descriptional complexity of complementation for nondeterministic IDPDAs is 2(Theta(n2)), and that the descriptional complexity of homomorphisms for deterministic IDPDAs is 2(Theta(n2)).