Seminars

Speaker: Aliaume Lopez (www.lsv.fr/~lopez/)

Title: Which polynomials are computed by N-weighted automata?

Room: B21

Abstract:
Given a semiring K, the notion of K-weighted automata generalizes regular languages to functions from Σ* to K. This model allows us to compute (multivariate) polynomial functions with coefficients in K. We provide a decidable characterization of polynomials with coefficients in Q that can be computed by K-weighted automata for K = (N,+,×) and for K = (Z+,×). As a consequence, we can decide which functions computed by Z-weighted automata are computed by N-weighted automata, under the assumption of commutativity (the order of the letters in the input does not matter) and polynomial growth (the output of the function is bounded by a polynomial in the size of the input). This surprisingly allows us to decide whether such functions are star-free, a notion borrowed from the theory of regular languages.