4.5. SUMMARY OF CHAPTER 4 165
Figure 4.15: Another DFA to minimize
4.5 Summary of Chapter 4
+ The Pumping Lemma: Ifa language is regular, then every sufficiently long
string in the language has a nonempty substring that can be “pumped,”
that is, repeated any number of times while the resulting strings are also
in the language. This fact can be used to prove that many different
languages are not regular.
4 Operations That Preserve the Property of Being a Reyular Language:
‘There are tnany operations that, when applied to regular languages, yield
a regular language as a result. Among these are union, concatenation, clo-
sure, intersection, complementation, difference, reversal, homomorphism
(replacement of each symbol by an associated string), and inverse homo-
morphism.
+ Testing Emptiness of Regular Languages: There is an algorithm that,
given a iepreseutation of a rogular language, suck as an automaton or
regular expression, tells whether or not the represented language is the
empty set.
+ Testing Membership in a Regular Language: There is an algorithm that.
given a string and a representation of a regular language, tells whether or
not the string is in the language.
+ Testing Distinguishability of States: Two states of a DFA are distinguish-
able if there is au input string Uat takes exactly one of the two states to
an accepting state. By starting with only the fact that, pairs consisting of
one accepting and one nonaccepting state are distinguishable, and trying
to discover addition pairs of distinguishable states by finding pairs whose
successors on one input symbol are distingnishable, we can discover all
pairs of distinguishable states.166 CHAPTER 4. PROPERTIES OF REGULAR LANGUAGES
+ Minimizing Deterministic Finite Automata: We can partition the states
of any DFA into groups of mutually indistinguishable states. Members of
two different groups are always distinguishable. If we replace each group
by a single state, we gel an equivalent DFA that has as few states as any
DEA for the same language.
4.6 References for Chapter 4
Except for the obvious closure properties of regular expressions — union, con-
catenation, and star — that were shown by Kleene [6], almost all resnlts about
closure properties of the regular languages mimic similar results about contes
fee languages (Whe class of languages we study in the next chapters). Thus,
the pumping lemma for regular languages is a simplification of a correspoud-
ing result for context frec languages by Bar-Hillel, Perles, and Shamir [1]. The
same paper indirectly gives us several of the other closure properties shown
here. However, the closure under inverse homomorphism is from [2]
‘The quotient operation introduced in Exercise 4.2.2 is from (3). In fact, that
paper talks about a more general operation where in place of a single symbol a
is any regular language. The series of operations of the “partial removal” type,
starting with Exercise 4.2.8 on the first halves of strings in a regular language.
began with [8). Sciferas and McNaughton (9} worked out the general case of
when a removal operation preserves regular languages
‘The original decision algorithms, such as emptiness, finiteness, aud member-
ship for regular languages, are from [7]. Algorithns for minimizing the states
of a DFA appear there and in [5]. ‘Lhe most efficient algorithm for finding the
mininum-state DFA is in (4).
1. Y. Bar-Hillel, M. Perles, and E. Shamir, “On formal propertics of simple
phrase-structure grammars." 2. Phonetik. Sprachaniss Komanunikutions-
forseh. 14 (1961), pp. 143 172
burg and G. Rose, “Operations which preserve definability mn lan=
” dt, AGM 10:2 (1963), pp. 175-195,
3. 8. Ginsburg and B. H. Spanier, “Quotients of context-free languages,” J.
ACM 10:4 (1963), pp. 487-492.
4. JB. Moperoft, “Au rlogn algorithm for minimizing the states in a finite
automaton,” in Z. Kohavi (ed.) The Theory of Machines and Computa-
tions, Academic Press, New York, pp. 189-196.
D. A. Huifinan, is of sequential switching circuits,” J. Prank
lin Inst. 287: 1), pp. 161 190 and 275-303.
6. S.C. Kleene, “Representation of events in nerve nets and finite automata,”
in C. E, Shannon and J, MeCarthy, Automata Studies, Princeton U1
Press, 1956, pp. 3-42,4.6. REFERENCES FC
s
CHAPTER
7. B. F. Moore, “Gedanken experiments on sequential machines,” in C. E.
Shannon and J. McCarthy, Automata Studies, Princeton Univ. Press,
1956, pp. 129-153.
8. RE. Steams and J. Hartmania, “Regularity-preserving modifications of
regular expressions,” Information and Control 6:1 (1963), pp. 55-69.
9. J. 1. Seiferas and R. McNaughton, “Regularity-preserving modifications,”
Theoretical Computer Science 2:2 (1976), pp. 147-154.