On the iterated hairpin completion

  • Authors:

  • Steffen Kopecki

  • Affiliations:

  • Universität Stuttgart, FMI

  • Venue:
  • DLT'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Developments in language theory
  • Year:
  • 2010

  • Bounded Hairpin Completion

    LATA '09 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The hairpin completion is a natural operation on formal languages which has been inspired by biochemistry and DNA-computing. In this paper we solve two problems which were posed first in 2008 and 2009, respectively, and still left open: 1.) It is known that the iterated hairpin completion of a regular language is not context-free in general, but it was open whether the iterated hairpin completion of a singleton or finite language is regular or at least context-free. We will show that it can be non-context-free. 2.) A restricted but also very natural variant of the hairpin completion is the bounded hairpin completion. It was unknown whether the iterated bounded hairpin completion of a regular language remains regular. We prove that this is indeed the case.