One-Counter Automata with Counter Visibility.
Benedikt Bollig · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2016
In a one-counter automaton (OCA), one can read a letter from some finite alphabet, increment and decrement the counter by one, or test it for zero. It is well-known that universality and language inclusion for OCAs are undecidable. We consider here OCAs with counter visibility: Whenever the automaton produces a letter, it outputs the current counter value along with it. Hence, its language is now a set of words over an infinite alphabet. We show that universality and inclusion for that model are in PSPACE, thus no harder than the corresponding problems for finite automata, which can actually be considered as a special case. In fact, we show that OCAs with counter visibility are effectively determinizable and closed under all boolean operations. As a strict generalization, we subsequently extend our model by registers. The general nonemptiness problem being undecidable, we impose a bound on the number of register comparisons and show that the corresponding nonemptiness problem is NP-complete.