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New characterizations of exponential, elementary, and non-elementary time-bounded Turing machines

Date

2023-06

Authors

Ibarra, Oscar H.
McQuillan, Ian

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Publisher

Elsevier

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Article

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Abstract

Machine models with multiple types of stores are studied. Deterministic two-way pushdown automata augmented by some number of checking stacks are known to accept exactly the class of elementary languages, which is very general but still has a decidable membership problem. First, we define such a machine to be synchronous if, when a checking stack starts to read from its stack, all other checking stacks can no longer write. For such a synchronous machine, the multiple checking stacks are equivalent to machines with 2 synchronous checking stacks which, in turn, are equivalent to exponential time-bounded deterministic Turing machines. Next, we also show that for any (reasonably defined) one-way deterministic machine model M with a decidable membership problem, the two-way deterministic multi-head variant of M augmented by any number of checking stacks also has a decidable membership problem. We also examine a model, two-way deterministic pushdown automata augmented with some number of non-erasing stacks, where the machine starts reading from the stacks at most a linear number of times. We show that this model accepts non-elementary languages but still has a decidable membership problem, resolving an open problem from the literature.

Description

This is the accepted manuscript of the original article "New characterizations of exponential, elementary, and non-elementary time-bounded Turing machines" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ic.2023.105027) published in the journal "Information and Computation" published by Elsevier.

Keywords

Stack automata, Checking stack automata, Turing machines, Complexity classes, Elementary languages

Citation

Ibarra, O. H., & McQuillan, I. (2023). New characterizations of exponential, elementary, and non-elementary time-bounded Turing machines. Information and Computation, 292, 105027. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ic.2023.105027

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ic.2023.105027

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