Mergible states in large NFA

Authors:
Cezar Câmpeanu;Nicolae Sântean;Sheng Yu
Affiliations:
Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, Canada, PE1 C1A 4P3;Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario, Middlesex College 383, London, Ont., Canada, N6A 5B8;Department of Computer Science, University of Western Ontario, Middlesex College 383, London, Ont., Canada, N6A 5B8
Venue:
Theoretical Computer Science - Insightful theory
Year:
2005

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Abstract

Quite often, trivial problems stated for deterministic finite automata (DFA) are surprisingly difficult for the non-deterministic case (NFA). In any non-minimal DFA for a given regular language, we can find two equivalent states which can be "merged" without changing the accepted language. This is not the case for NFA, where we can have non-minimal automata with no "mergible" states. In this paper, we prove a very basic result for NFA, that for a given regular language, any NFA of size greater than a computable constant must contain mergible states. Even more, we parameterized this constant in order to guarantee groups of an arbitrary number of mergible states.