The word problem for finitary automaton groups

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Authors: Maximilian Kotowsky, Jan Philipp Wächter
Cited by: 0
References: 33

Abstract

A finitary automaton group is a group generated by an invertible, deterministic finite-state letter-to-letter transducer whose only cycles are self-loops at an identity state. We show that, for this presentation of finite groups, the uniform word problem is coNP-complete. Here, the input consists of a finitary automaton together with a finite state sequence and the question is whether the sequence acts trivially on all input words. Additionally, we also show that the respective compressed word problem, where the state sequence is given as a straight-line program, is PSpace-complete. In both cases, we give a direct reduction from the satisfiability problem for (quantified) boolean formulae and we further show that the problems remain complete for their respective classes if we restrict the input alphabet of the automata to a binary one.

Fields of Study & Subjects

semigroups and automata theory DNA and Biological Computing Algorithms and Data Compression

Publication details

Journal / source
Information and Computation
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Volume
313
Pages
105504–105504
Publication date
19 August 2026
Language
EN