STATE COMPLEXITY OF UNION AND INTERSECTION OF FINITE LANGUAGES
Yo-Sub Han, Kai Salomaa · International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science · 2008
We investigate the state complexity of union and intersection for finite languages. Note that the problem of obtaining the tight bounds for both operations was open. First we compute upper bounds using structural properties of minimal deterministic finite-state automata for finite languages. Then, we show that the upper bounds are tight if we have a variable sized alphabet that can depend on the size of input deterministic finite-state automata. In addition, we prove that the upper bounds are unreachable for any fixed sized alphabet.