In 1978, Courcelle asked for a complete set of axioms and rules for the equational theory of (discrete regular) words equipped with the operations of product, omega power and omega-op power. In this paper we find a simple set of equations and prove they are complete. Moreover, we show that the equational theory is decidable in polynomial time.

We study the succinctness of monadic second-order logic and a variety of monadic fixed point logics on trees. All these languages are known to have the same expressive power on trees, but some can express the same queries much more succinctly than others. For example, we show that, under some complexity theoretic assumption, monadic second-order logic is non-elementarily more succinct than monadic least fixed point logic, which in turn is non-elementarily more succinct than monadic datalog.
Succinctness of the languages is closely related to the combined and parameterised complexity of query evaluation for these languages.

This paper surveys the area of Free Burnside Semigroups. The theory of these semigroups, as is the case for groups, is far from being completely known. For semigroups, the most impressive results were obtained in the last 10 years. In this paper we give priority to the mathematical treatment of the problem and do not stress too much neither motivation nor the historical aspects. No proofs are presented in this paper, but we tried to give as many examples as was possible.

We present a new model of a two-dimensional computing device called Sgraffito automaton. In general, the model is quite simple, which allows a clear design of computations. When restricted to one-dimensional inputs, that is, strings, the Sgraffito automaton does not exceed the power of finite-state automata. On the other hand, for two-dimensional inputs, it yields a family of picture languages with good closure properties that strictly includes the class REC  of recognizable picture languages. The deterministic Sgraffito automata define a class of picture languages that includes the class of deterministic recognizable picture languages DREC, the class of picture languages that are accepted by four-way alternating automata, those that are accepted by deterministic one-marker automata, and the sudoku-deterministically recognizable picture languages, but the membership problem for the accepted languages is still decidable in polynomial time. In addition, the deterministic Sgraffito automata accept some unary picture languages that are outside of the class REC.

In a previous paper, the authors studied the polynomial closure of a variety of languages and gave an algebraic counterpart, in terms of Mal'cev products, of this operation. They also formulated a conjecture about the algebraic counterpart of the boolean closure of the polynomial closure – this operation corresponds to passing to the upper level in any concatenation hierarchy. Although this conjecture is probably true in some particular cases, we give a counterexample in the general case. Another counterexample, of a different nature, was independently given recently by Steinberg. Taking these two counterexamples into account, we propose a modified version of our conjecture and some supporting evidence for that new formulation. We show in particular that a solution to our new conjecture would give a solution of the decidability of the levels 2 of the Straubing–Thérien hierarchy and of the dot-depth hierarchy. Consequences for the other levels are also discussed.

Episturmian morphisms constitute a powerful tool to study episturmian words. Indeed, any episturmian word can be infinitely decomposed over the set of pure episturmian morphisms. Thus, an episturmian word can be defined by one of its morphic decompositions or, equivalently, by a certain directive word. Here we characterize pairs of words directing the same episturmian word. We also propose a way to uniquely define any episturmian word through a normalization of its directive words. As a consequence of these results, we characterize episturmian words having a unique directive word.

The infinite Post Correspondence Problem (ωPCP) was shown to be undecidable by Ruohonen (1985) in general. Blondel and Canterini [Theory Comput. Syst. 36 (2003) 231–245] showed that ωPCP is undecidable for domain alphabets of size 105, Halava and Harju [RAIRO–Theor. Inf. Appl. 40 (2006) 551–557] showed that ωPCP is undecidable for domain alphabets of size 9. By designing a special coding, we delete a letter from Halava and Harju’s construction. So we prove that ωPCP is undecidable for domain alphabets of size 8.

We define H- and EH-expressions as extensions of regular expressions by adding homomorphic and iterated homomorphic replacement as new operations, resp. The definition is analogous to the extension given by Gruska in order to characterize context-free languages. We compare the families of languages obtained by these extensions with the families of regular, linear context-free, context-free, and EDT0L languages. Moreover, relations to language families based on patterns, multi-patterns, pattern expressions, H-systems and uniform substitutions are also investigated. Furthermore, we present their closure properties with respect to TRIO operations and discuss the decidability status and complexity of fixed and general membership, emptiness, and the equivalence problem.

This paper gives a shortest path algorithm for CFG (context free grammar) labeled and weighted digraphs where edge weights may be positive or negative, but negative-weight cycles are not allowed in the underlying unlabeled graph. These results build directly on an algorithm of Barrett et al. [SIAM J. Comput.30 (2000) 809–837]. In addition to many other results, they gave a shortest path algorithm for CFG labeled and weighted digraphs where all edges are nonnegative. Our algorithm is based closely on Barrett et al.'s algorithm as well as Johnson's algorithm for shortest paths in digraphs whose edges may have positive or negative weights.

We introduce natural generalizations of two well-known dynamical systems, the Sand Piles Model and the Brylawski's model. We describe their order structure, their reachable configuration's characterization, their fixed points and their maximal and minimal length's chains. Finally, we present an induced model generating the set of unimodal sequences which amongst other corollaries, implies that this set is equipped with a lattice structure.

Cameron introduced the orbit algebra of a permutation group and conjectured that this algebra is an integral domain if and only if the group has no finite orbit. We prove that this conjecture holds and in fact that the age algebra of a relational structure R is an integral domain if and only if R is age-inexhaustible. We deduce these results from a combinatorial lemma asserting that if a product of two non-zero elements of a set algebra is zero then there is a finite common tranversal of their supports. The proof is built on Ramsey theorem and the integrity of a shuffle algebra.

The aim of this paper is to design a theoretical framework that allows us to perform the computation of regular expression derivatives through a space of generic structures. Thanks to this formalism, the main properties of regular expression derivation, such as the finiteness of the set of derivatives, need only be stated and proved one time, at the top level. Moreover, it is shown how to construct an alternating automaton associated with the derivation of a regular expression in this general framework. Finally, Brzozowski’s derivation and Antimirov’s derivation turn out to be a particular case of this general scheme and it is shown how to construct a DFA, a NFA and an AFA for both of these derivations.

We prove that there exists a structure M whose monadic second order theory is decidable, and such that the first-order theory of every expansion of M by a constant is undecidable. 


In this paper, we study two kinds of combinatorial objects, generalized integer partitions and tilings of 2D-gons (hexagons, octagons, decagons, etc.). We show that the sets of partitions, ordered with a simple dynamics, have the distributive lattice structure. Likewise, we show that the set of tilings of a 2D-gon is the disjoint union of distributive lattices which we describe. We also discuss the special case of linear integer partitions, for which other dynamical models exist.

The MATRIX PACKING DOWN problem asks to find a row permutation of a given (0,1)-matrix in such a way that the total sum of the first non-zero column indexes is maximized. We study the computational complexity of this problem. We prove that the MATRIX PACKING DOWN problem is NP-complete even when restricted to zero trace symmetric (0,1)-matrices or to (0,1)-matrices with at most two 1's per column. Also, as intermediate results, we introduce several new simple graph layout problems which are proved to be NP-complete.

We introduce doubly-ranked (DR) monoids in order to study picturecodes. We show that a DR-monoid is free iff it is pictoriallystable. This allows us to associate with a set C of pictures apicture code B(C) which is the basis of the least DR-monoidincluding C.A weak version of the defect theorem for pictures is established.A characterization of picture codes through picture series isalso given.

Wang automata are devices for picture language recognition recently introduced by us, which characterize the class REC of recognizable picture languages. Thus, Wang automata are equivalent to tiling systems or online tessellation acceptors, and are based like Wang systems on labeled Wang tiles. The present work focus on scanning strategies, to prove that the ones Wang automata are based on are those following four kinds of movements: boustrophedonic, “L-like”, “U-like”, and spirals.

The graph product is an operator mixing direct and free products. It is already known that free products and direct products of automatic monoids are automatic. The main aim of this paper is to prove that graph products of automatic monoids of finite geometric type are still automatic. A similar result for prefix-automatic monoids is established.

In this paper we investigate the average Horton-Strahler number of all possible tree-structures of binary tries. For that purpose we consider a generalization of extended binary trees where leaves are distinguished in order to represent the location of keys within a corresponding trie. Assuming a uniform distribution for those trees we prove that the expected Horton-Strahler number of a tree with α internal nodes and β leaves that correspond to a key is asymptotically given by $$\frac{4^{2\beta-\alpha}\log(\alpha)(2\beta-1)(\alpha+1)(\alpha+2){2\alpha+1\choose \alpha-1}}{8\sqrt{\pi}\alpha^{3/2}\log(2)(\beta-1)\beta{2\beta\choose \beta}^2}$$ provided that α and β grow in some fixed proportion ρ when α → ∞ . A similar result is shown for trees with α internal nodes but with an arbitrary number of keys.

We show that the validity of Parikh's theorem for context-free languages depends only on a few equational properties of least pre-fixed points. Moreover, we exhibit an infinite basis of μ-term equations of continuous commutative idempotent semirings.