The states of a finite-state automaton 𝒩 can be identified with collections of words in the prefix closure of the regular language accepted by 𝒩. But words can be ordered, and among the many possible orders a very natural one is the co-lexicographic order. Such naturalness stems from the fact that it suggests a transfer of the order from words to the automaton’s states. This suggestion is, in fact, concrete and in a number of articles automata admitting a total co-lexicographic ( co-lex for brevity) ordering of states have been proposed and studied. Such class of ordered automata — Wheeler automata — turned out to require just a constant number of bits per transition to be represented and enable regular expression matching queries in constant time per matched character. Unfortunately, not all automata can be totally ordered as previously outlined. In the present work, we lay out a new theory showing that all automata can always be partially ordered, and an intrinsic measure of their complexity can be defined and effectively determined, namely, the minimum width p of one of their admissible co-lex partial orders –dubbed here the automaton’s co-lex width . We first show that this new measure captures at once the complexity of several seemingly-unrelated hard problems on automata. Any NFA of co-lex width p : (i) has an equivalent powerset DFA whose size is exponential in p rather than (as a classic analysis shows) in the NFA’s size; (ii) can be encoded using just Θ(log p ) bits per transition; (iii) admits a linear-space data structure solving regular expression matching queries in time proportional to p 2 per matched character. Some consequences of this new parameterization of automata are that PSPACE-hard problems such as NFA equivalence are FPT in p , and quadratic lower bounds for the regular expression matching problem do not hold for sufficiently small p . Having established that the co-lex width of an automaton is a fundamental complexity measure, we proceed by (i) determining its computational complexity and (ii) extending this notion from automata to regular languages by studying their smallest-width accepting NFAs and DFAs. In this work we focus on the deterministic case and prove that a canonical minimum-width DFA accepting a language ℒ–dubbed the Hasse automaton ℋ of ℒ–can be exhibited. ℋ provides, in a precise sense, the best possible way to (partially) order the states of any DFA accepting ℒ, as long as we want to maintain an operational link with the (co-lexicographic) order of ℒ’s prefixes. Finally, we explore the relationship between two conflicting objectives: minimizing the width and minimizing the number of states of a DFA. In this context, we provide an analogue of the Myhill-Nerode Theorem for co-lexicographically ordered regular languages.

Indexing strings via prefix (or suffix) sorting is, arguably, one of the most successful algorithmic techniques developed in the last decades. Can indexing be extended to languages? The main contribution of this paper is to initiate the study of the sub-class of regular languages accepted by an automaton whose states can be prefix-sorted. Starting from the recent notion of Wheeler graph [Gagie et al., TCS 2017]— which extends naturally the concept of prefix sorting to labeled graphs—we investigate the properties of Wheeler languages, that is, regular languages admitting an accepting Wheeler finite automaton. We first characterize this family as the natural extension of regular languages endowed with the co-lexicographic ordering: the sorted prefixes of strings belonging to a Wheeler language are partitioned into a finite number of co-lexicographic intervals, each formed by elements from a single Myhill-Nerode equivalence class. We proceed by proving several results related to Wheeler automata: (i) We show that every Wheeler NFA (WNFA) with n states admits an equivalent Wheeler DFA (WDFA) with at most 2n – 1 – |Σ| states (Σ being the alphabet) that can be computed in O(n3) time. (ii) We describe a quadratic algorithm to prefix-sort a proper superset of the WDFAs, a O(n log n)-time online algorithm to sort acyclic WDFAs, and an optimal linear-time offline algorithm to sort general WDFAs. (iii) We provide a minimization theorem that characterizes the smallest WDFA recognizing the same language of any input WDFA. The corresponding constructive algorithm runs in optimal linear time in the acyclic case, and in O(n log n) time in the general case. (iv) We show how to compute the smallest WDFA equivalent to any acyclic DFA in nearly-optimal time. Our contributions imply new results of independent interest. Contributions (i-iii) provide a new class of NFAs for which the minimization problem can be approximated within a constant factor in polynomial time. Contribution (iv) provides a provably minimum-size solution for the well-studied problem of indexing deterministicacyclic graphs for linear-time pattern matching queries.

Abstract In this paper we consider modal team logic, a generalization of classical modal logic in which it is possible to describe dependence phenomena between data. We prove that most known fragments of full modal team logic allow the elimination of the so called ‘existential bisimulation quantifiers’, where the existence of a certain set is required only modulo bisimulation (i.e. not in the model itself but possibly in a bisimilar model). As a consequence, we prove that these fragments enjoy the uniform interpolation property.

Building on previous work by Mummertet al.(2015, The modal logic of Reverse Mathematics.Archive for Mathematical54(3–4) 425–437), we study the logic underlying the web of implications and non-implications which constitute the so called reverse mathematics zoo. We introduce a tableaux system for this logic and natural deduction systems for important fragments of the language.

We introduce and prove the basic properties of encodings that generalize to non-well-founded hereditarily finite sets the bijection defined by Ackermann in 1937 between hereditarily finite sets and natural numbers.

We consider the μ-calculus over graphs where the accessibility relation is an equivalence (S5-graphs). We show that the vectorial μ-calculus model checking problem over arbitrary graphs reduces to the vectorial, existential μ-calculus model checking problem over S5 graphs. Moreover, we give a proof that satisfiability of μ-calculus in S5 is NP-complete, and by using S5 graphs we give a new proof that the satisfiability problem of the existential μ-calculus is also NP-complete. Finally we prove that on multimodal S5, in contrast with the monomodal case, the fixpoint hierarchy of the μ-calculus is infinite and the finite model property fails.

We consider the hierarchy of the modal μ-calculus over reflexive and symmetric graphs and show that in this class the modal μ-calculus hierarchy is infinite. In the proof, a parity game over a tree is transformed into a equivalent parity game where Duplicator, when playing over the reflexive and symmetric closure of the tree, will never use loops or back edges.

We consider three basic questions regarding the extension of modal logic with a special kind of propositional quantifiers, known as bisimulation quantifiers, over arbitrary classes of frames: bisimulation invariance, uniform interpolation, and expressive power. In particular: – we discuss the relation between bisimulation invariance of bisimulation quantifiers and the semantical notion of amalgamation of the class of frames; – we consider a strong form of interpolation, uniform interpolation, and its relation with the closure under bisimulation quantifiers; – we compare bisimulation quantifiers logic with the better known extension of modal logic with extremal fixed points.

In this paper the problem of interpolation for the family of countable infinitary graded modal logics is considered. It is well known that interpolation fails in general for these logics and it is then natural to ask for a semantical characterization (stronger than entailment) of pairs of graded formulae having an interpolant. This is obtained using the notion of entailment along elementary equivalence. More precisely, we prove that if L is a graded modal logic then a pair (ø, ψ) of graded formulae in L have an interpolant in L if, and only if, ø entails ψ along elementary equivalence with respect to L. This characterization is obtained by adapting to graded modal logics the method of consistency property modulo bisimulation, which was previously used in Infinitary Logic and Infinitary Modal Logic. In the case of full Countable Infinitary Graded Modal Logic we improve this result and show that this logic enjoys Craig interpolation. This is done using a characterization of graded bisimulation between models via isomorphism of their unravellings.

The (modal) μ-calculus ([14]) is a very powerful extension of modal logic with least and greatest fixed point operators. It is of great interest to computer science for expressing properties of processes such as termination (every run is finite) and fairness (on every infinite run, no action is repeated infinitely often to the exclusion of all others). The power of the μ-calculus is also evident from a more theoretical perspective. The μ-calculus is a fragment of monadic second-order logic (MSO) containing only formulae that are invariant for bisimulation, in the sense that they cannot distinguish between bisimilar states. Janin and Walukiewicz prove the converse: any property which is invariant for bisimulation and MSO-expressible is already expressible in the μ-calculus ([13]). Yet the μ-calculus enjoys many desirable properties which MSO lacks, like a complete sequent-calculus ([29]), an exponential-time decision procedure, and the finite model property ([25]). Switching from MSO to its bisimulation-invariant fragment gives us these desirable properties. In this paper we take a classical logician's view of the μ-calculus. As far as we are concerned a new logic should not be allowed into the community of logics without at least considering the standard questions that any logic is bothered with. In this paper we perform this rite of passage for the μ-calculus. The questions we will be concerned with are the following.

We investigate modal deduction through translation into standard logic and set theory. In a previous paper, using a set-theoretic translation method, we proved that derivability in the minimal modal logic K, corresponds precisely to derivability in a weak, computationally attractive set theory ω In this paper, this approach is shown equivalent to working with standard first-order translations of modal formulae in a theory of general frames. The employed techniques are mainly model-theoretic and set-theoretic, and they admit extensions to richer languages and modal deductive systems than that of basic modal logic. Some of these extensions are discussed in the last part of the paper.