This paper studies the complexity of operations on finite automata and the complexity of their decision problems when the alphabet is unary. Let $n$ denote the maximum of the number of states of the input finite automata considered in the corresponding results. The following main results are obtained: (1) Given two unary NFAs recognising $L$ and $H$, respectively, one can decide whether $L \subseteq H$ as well as whether $L = H$ in time $2^{O((n \log n)^{1/3})}$. The previous upper bound on time was $2^{O((n \log n)^{1/2})}$ as given by Chrobak (1986), and this bound was not significantly improved since then. (2) Given two unary UFAs (unambiguous finite automata) recognising $L$ and $H$, respectively, one can determine a UFA recognising $L \cup H$ and a UFA recognising complement of $L$, where these output UFAs have the number of states bounded by a quasipolynomial in $n$. However, in the worst case, a UFA for recognising concatenation of languages recognised by two $n$-state UFAs, uses $2^{Θ((n \log^2 n)^{1/3})}$ states. (3) Given a unary language $L$, if $L$ contains the word of length $k$, then let $L(k)=1$ else let $L(k)=0$. Let $ω_L$ be the $ω$-word $L(0)L(1)\ldots$ and let $\cal L$ be a fixed $ω$-regular language. The last section studies how difficult it is to decide, given an $n$-state UFA or NFA

The Exact Satisfiability problem, XSAT, is defined as the problem of finding a satisfying assignment to a formula $$\varphi $$ in CNF such that exactly one literal in each clause is assigned to be “1” and the other literals in the same clause are set to “0”. Since it is an important variant of the satisfiability problem, XSAT has also been studied heavily and has seen numerous improvements to the development of its exact algorithms over the years. The fastest known exact algorithm to solve XSAT runs in $$O(1.1730^n)$$ time, where n is the number of variables in the formula. In this paper, we propose a faster exact algorithm that solves the problem in $$O(1.1674^n)$$ time. Like many of the authors working on this problem, we give a DPLL algorithm to solve it. The novelty of this paper lies on the design of the nonstandard measure, to help us to tighten the analysis of the algorithm further.

X3SAT is the problem of whether one can satisfy a given set of clauses with up to three literals such that in every clause, exactly one literal is true and the others are false. A related question is to determine the maximal Hamming distance between two solutions of the instance. Dahllöf provided an algorithm for Maximum Hamming Distance XSAT, which is more complicated than the same problem for X3SAT, with a runtime of $O(1.8348^n)$; Fu, Zhou and Yin considered Maximum Hamming Distance for X3SAT and found for this problem an algorithm with runtime $O(1.6760^n)$. In this paper, we propose an algorithm in $O(1.3298^n)$ time to solve the Max Hamming Distance X3SAT problem; the algorithm actually counts for each $k$ the number of pairs of solutions which have Hamming Distance $k$.

XSAT is defined as the following: Given a propositional formula in conjunctive normal form, can one find an assignment to variables such that there is exactly only 1 literal that is true in every clause, while the other literals are false. The decision problem XSAT is known to be NP-complete. Crescenzi and Rossi [Pierluigi Crescenzi and Gianluca Rossi, 2002] introduced the variant where one searches for a pair of two solutions of an X3SAT instance with maximal Hamming Distance among them, that is, one wants to identify the largest number k such that there are two solutions of the instance with Hamming Distance k. Dahllöf [Vilhelm Dahllöf, 2005; Vilhelm Dahllöf, 2006] provided an algorithm using branch and bound method for Max Hamming Distance XSAT in O(1.8348^n); Fu, Zhou and Yin [Linlu Fu and Minghao Yin, 2012] worked on a more specific problem, the Max Hamming Distance X3SAT, and found for this problem an algorithm with runtime O(1.6760^n). In this paper, we propose an exact exponential algorithm to solve the Max Hamming Distance XSAT problem in O(1.4983^n) time. Like all of them, we will use the branch and bound technique alongside a newly defined measure to improve the analysis of the algorithm.