Descriptional complexity of two-way pushdown automata with restricted head reversals

  • Authors:
  • Andreas Malcher;Carlo Mereghetti;Beatrice Palano

  • Affiliations:
  • Institut für Informatik, Universität Giessen, Arndtstr. 2, 35392 Giessen, Germany;Dipartimento di Scienze dellInformazione, Università degli Studi di Milano via Comelico 39/41, 20135 Milano, Italy;Dipartimento di Scienze dellInformazione, Università degli Studi di Milano via Comelico 39/41, 20135 Milano, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Two-way nondeterministic pushdown automata (2PDA) are classical nondeterministic pushdown automata (PDA) enhanced with two-way motion of the input head. In this paper, the subclass of 2PDA accepting bounded languages and making at most a constant number of input head turns is studied with respect to descriptional complexity aspects. In particular, the effect of reducing the number of pushdown reversals to a constant number is of interest. It turns out that this reduction leads to an exponential blow-up in case of nondeterministic devices, and to a doubly-exponential blow-up in case of deterministic devices. If the restriction on boundedness of the languages considered and on the finiteness of the number of head and pushdown turns is dropped, the resulting trade-offs are no longer bounded by recursive functions, and so-called non-recursive trade-offs are shown.