Abstract. We consider membership problems for rational subsets of the semigroup of [Formula: see text] matrices over [Formula: see text]. For a semigroup [Formula: see text], the rational subsets [Formula: see text] are defined as the sets accepted by nondeterministic finite automatons whose transitions are labeled by elements of [Formula: see text]. In general, it is undecidable on inputs [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] whether [Formula: see text] belongs to [Formula: see text]. Therefore, we restrict our attention to the family [Formula: see text] of flat rational subsets of [Formula: see text] over [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is a subsemigroup of [Formula: see text]. It consists of finite unions of the form [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. Assuming that the membership for [Formula: see text] is decidable, we prove various results when the membership for [Formula: see text] is decidable. If [Formula: see text] is a subgroup of a group [Formula: see text], then we provide a rather general condition when [Formula: see text] is an (effective) relative Boolean algebra. This leads to one of our main results that the emptiness problem for Boolean combinations of sets in [Formula: see text] is decidable. It is possible that such a strong decidability result cannot be pushed any further for groups sitting between [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. To support this possibility, we prove the following dichotomy: If [Formula: see text] is a finitely generated group such that [Formula: see text], then either [Formula: see text] or [Formula: see text] contains an extension of the Baumslag–Solitar group [Formula: see text] of infinite index. It is open whether the membership for rational subsets is decidable in the latter case. For singular matrices, we will show that the membership problem for [Formula: see text] is decidable in doubly exponential time, where [Formula: see text] is the monoid generated by [Formula: see text].

Abstract Traditionally, graph algorithms get a single graph as input, and then they should decide if this graph satisfies a certain property $$\varPhi $$ Φ . What happens if this question is modified in a way that we get a possibly infinite family of graphs as an input, and the question is if there is a graph satisfying $$\varPhi $$ Φ in the family? We approach this question by using formal languages for specifying families of graphs, in particular by regular sets of words. We show that certain graph properties can be decided by studying the syntactic monoid of the specification language L if a certain torsion condition is satisfied. This condition holds trivially if L is regular. More specifically, we use a natural binary encoding of finite graphs over a binary alphabet $$\varSigma $$ Σ , and we define a regular set $$\mathbb {G}\subseteq \varSigma ^*$$ G ⊆ Σ ∗ such that every nonempty word $$w\in \mathbb {G}$$ w ∈ G defines a finite and nonempty graph. Also, graph properties can then be syntactically defined as languages over $$\varSigma $$ Σ . Then, we ask whether the automaton $$\mathcal {A}$$ A specifies some graph satisfying a certain property $$\varPhi $$ Φ . Our structural results show that we can answer this question for all “typical” graph properties. In order to show our results, we split L into a finite union of subsets and every subset of this union defines in a natural way a single finite graph F where some edges and vertices are marked. The marked graph in turn defines an infinite graph $$F^\infty $$ F ∞ and therefore the family of finite subgraphs of $$F^\infty $$ F ∞ where F appears as an induced subgraph. This yields a geometric description of all graphs specified by L based on splitting L into finitely many pieces; then using the notion of graph retraction, we obtain an easily understandable description of the graphs in each piece.

We study the matching problem of regular tree languages, that is, "$\exists \sigma:\sigma(L)\subseteq R$?" where $L,R$ are regular tree languages over the union of finite ranked alphabets $\Sigma$ and $\mathcal{X}$ where $\mathcal{X}$ is an alphabet of variables and $\sigma$ is a substitution such that $\sigma(x)$ is a set of trees in $T(\Sigma\cup H)\setminus H$ for all $x\in \mathcal{X}$. Here, $H$ denotes a set of "holes" which are used to define a "sorted" concatenation of trees. Conway studied this problem in the special case for languages of finite words in his classical textbook "Regular algebra and finite machines" published in 1971. He showed that if $L$ and $R$ are regular, then the problem "$\exists \sigma \forall x\in \mathcal{X}: \sigma(x)\neq \emptyset\wedge \sigma(L)\subseteq R$?" is decidable. Moreover, there are only finitely many maximal solutions, the maximal solutions are regular substitutions, and they are effectively computable. We extend Conway's results when $L,R$ are regular languages of finite and infinite trees, and language substitution is applied inside-out, in the sense of Engelfriet and Schmidt (1977/78). More precisely, we show that if $L\subseteq T(\Sigma\cup\mathcal{X})$ and $R\subseteq T(\Sigma)$ are regular tree languages over finite or infinite trees, then the problem "$\exists \sigma \forall x\in \mathcal{X}: \sigma(x)\neq \emptyset\wedge \sigma_{\mathrm{io}}(L)\subseteq R$?" is decidable. Here, the subscript "$\mathrm{io}$" in $\sigma_{\mathrm{io}}(L)$ refers to "inside-out". Moreover, there are only finitely many maximal solutions $\sigma$, the maximal solutions are regular substitutions and effectively computable. The corresponding question for the outside-in extension $\sigma_{\mathrm{oi}}$ remains open, even in the restricted setting of finite trees.

This work relates numerical problems on matrices over the rationals to symbolic algorithms on words and finite automata. Using exact algebraic algorithms and symbolic computation, we prove new decidability results for 2 × 2 matrices over Q. Namely, we introduce a notion of flat rational sets: if M is a monoid and N ≤ M is its submonoid, then flat rational sets of M relative to N are finite unions of the form L0g1 L1 ··· gtLt where all Lis are rational subsets of N and gi ∈ M. We give quite general sufficient conditions under which flat rational sets form an effective relative Boolean algebra. As a corollary, we obtain that the emptiness problem for Boolean combinations of flat rational subsets of GL(2, Q) over GL(2, Z) is decidable.

It is shown that the subgroup membership problem for a virtually free group can be decided in polynomial time where all group elements are represented by so-called power words, i.e., words of the form p_1^{z_1} p_2^{z_2} ⋯ p_k^{z_k}. Here the p_i are explicit words over the generating set of the group and all z_i are binary encoded integers. As a corollary, it follows that the subgroup membership problem for the matrix group GL(2,ℤ) can be decided in polynomial time when all matrix entries are given in binary notation.

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In various occasions the conjugacy problem in finitely generated amalgamated products and HNN extensions can be decided efficiently for elements which cannot be conjugated into the base groups. This observation asks for a bound on how many such elements there are. Such bounds can be derived using the theory of amenable graphs:

This article shows a general result about finite monoids and weight reducing string rewriting systems. As a consequence it proves a long standing conjecture in formal language theory: All regular languages are Church-Rosser congruential. The class of Church-Rosser congruential languages was introduced by McNaughton, Narendran, and Otto in 1988. A language L is Church-Rosser congruential if there exists a finite, confluent, and length-reducing semi-Thue system S such that L is a finite union of congruence classes modulo S . It was known that there are deterministic linear context-free languages which are not Church-Rosser congruential, but the conjecture was that all regular languages are of this form. The article offers a stronger statement: A language is regular if and only if it is strongly Church-Rosser congruential. It is the journal version of the conference abstract which was presented at ICALP 2012.

We consider three important and well-studied algorithmic problems in group theory: the word, geodesic, and conjugacy problem. We show transfer results from individual groups to graph products. We concentrate on logspace complexity because the challenge is actually in small complexity classes, only. The most difficult transfer result is for the conjugacy problem. We have a general result for graph products, but even in the special case of a graph group the result is new. Graph groups are closely linked to the theory of Mazurkiewicz traces which form an algebraic model for concurrent processes. Our proofs are combinatorial and based on well-known concepts in trace theory. We also use rewriting techniques over traces. For the group-theoretical part we apply Bass-Serre theory. But as we need explicit formulae and as we design concrete algorithms all our group-theoretical calculations are completely explicit and accessible to non-specialists.

Power circuits are data structures which support efficient algorithms for highly compressed integers. Using this new data structure it has been shown recently by Myasnikov, Ushakov and Won that the Word Problem of the one-relator Baumslag group is in P. Before that the best known upper bound was non-elementary. In the present paper we provide new results for power circuits and we give new applications in algorithmic group theory: 1. We define a modified reduction procedure on power circuits which runs in quadratic time thereby improving the known cubic time complexity. 2. We improve the complexity of the Word Problem for the Baumslag group to cubic time thereby providing the first practical algorithm for that problem. (The algorithm has been implemented and is available in the CRAG library.) 3. The main result is that the Word Problem of Higman's group is decidable in polynomial time. The situation for Higman's group is more complicated than for the Baumslag group and forced us to advance the theory of Power Circuits.

We give a new proof of the Krohn-Rhodes theorem using local divisors. The proof provides nearly as good a decomposition in terms of size as the holonomy decomposition of Eilenberg, avoids induction on the size of the state set, and works exclusively

We give topological and algebraic characterizations as well as language theoretic descriptions of the following subclasses of first-order logic $\mathrm{FO}[<]$ for $\omega$-languages: $\Sigma_2$, $\Delta_2$, $\mathrm{FO}^2 \cap \Sigma_2$ (and by duality $\mathrm{FO}^2 \cap \Pi_2$), and $\mathrm{FO}^2$. These descriptions extend the respective results for finite words. In particular, we relate the above fragments to language classes of certain (unambiguous) polynomials. An immediate consequence is the decidability of the membership problem of these classes, but this was shown before by Wilke (1998) and Boja{\'n}czyk (2008) and is therefore not our main focus. The paper is about the interplay of algebraic, topological, and language theoretic properties.

Timed automata are among the most widely studied models for real-time systems. Silent transitions, i.e., ϵ-transitions, have already been proposed in the original paper on timed automata by Alur and Dill [3]. We show that the class TL ϵ of timed languages recognized by automata with ϵ-transitions, is more robust and more expressive than the corresponding class TL without ϵ-transitions. We then focus on ϵ-transitions without reset, i.e. ϵ-transitions which do not reset clocks. We propose an algorithm to construct, given a timed automaton, an equivalent one without such transitions. This algorithm is in two steps, it first suppresses the cycles of ϵ-transitions without reset and then the remaining ones. Then, we prove that a timed automaton such that no ϵ-transition which resets clocks lies on any directed cycle, can be effectively transformed into a timed automaton without ϵtransitions. Interestingly, this main result holds under the assumption of non-Zenoness and it is false otherwise. To complete the picture, we exhibit a simple timed automaton with an ϵ-transition, which resets some clock, on a cycle and which is not equivalent to any ϵ-free timed automaton. To show this, we develop a promising new technique based on the notion of precise action. This paper presents a synthesis of the two conference communications [9] and [13].