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.