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On the Emptiness Problem for Two-Way NFA with One Reversal-Bounded Counter

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Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2002)

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Abstract

We show that the emptiness problem for two-way nondeterministic finite automata augmented with one reversal-bounded counter (i.e., the counter alternates between nondecreasing and nonincreasing modes a fixed number of times) operating on bounded languages (i.e., subsets of w 1 * ...w k * for some nonnull words w1,..., w k) is decidable, settling an open problem in [11,12]. The proof is a rather involved reduction to the solution of a special class of Diophantine systems of degree 2 via a class of programs called two-phase programs. The result has applications to verification of infinite state systems.

The work by Oscar H. Ibarra has been supported in part by NSF Grant IIS-0101134.

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Dang, Z., Ibarra, O.H., Sun, ZW. (2002). On the Emptiness Problem for Two-Way NFA with One Reversal-Bounded Counter. In: Bose, P., Morin, P. (eds) Algorithms and Computation. ISAAC 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2518. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36136-7_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36136-7_10

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