The Tractability Frontier for NFA Minimization
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Abstract
We essentially show that minimizing finite automata is NP-hard as soon as one deviates from the class of deterministic finite automata. More specifically, we show that minimization is NP-hard for all finite automata classes that subsume the class that is unambiguous, allows at most one state q with a non-deterministic transition for at most one alphabet symbol a, and is allowed to visit state q at most once in a run. Furthermore, this result holds even for automata that only accept finite languages.
Keywords
Minimization Problem Regular Expression Vertex Cover Regular Language Deterministic Finite Automaton
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