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ACMSE
2006
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Inductive bases and their application to searches for minimal unary NFAs

14 years 4 months ago
Inductive bases and their application to searches for minimal unary NFAs
Classic results in the theory of regular languages show that the problem of converting an NFA (nondeterministic finite automaton) into a minimal equivalent NFA is NP-hard, even for NFAs over a unary alphabet. This paper describes work on fast search techniques for finding minimal NFAs. The foundation of our approach is a characterization theorem for NFAs: we prove that a language is recognized by an nstate NFA iff it has what we call an inductive basis of size n. Using this characterization, we develop a fast incremental search for minimal NFAs for unary languages. We study the performance of our search algorithm experimentally, showing that, as compared with exhaustive search, it cuts the search space dramatically.
Geoffrey Smith
Added 13 Jun 2010
Updated 13 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2006
Where ACMSE
Authors Geoffrey Smith
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