ON THE EQUIVALENCE OF TWO-WAY PUSHDOWN AUTOMATA AND COUNTER MACHINES OVER BOUNDED LANGUAGES

Abstract

It is known that two-way pushdown automata are more powerful than two-way counter machines. The result is also true for the case when the pushdown store and counter are reversal-bounded. In contrast, we show that two-way reversal-bounded push-down automata over bounded languages (i.e., subsets of [Formula: see text] for some distinct symbols a1,…, ak) are equivalent to two-way reversal-bounded counter machines. We also show that, unlike the unbounded input case, two-way reversal-bounded pushdown automata over bounded languages have decidable emptiness, equivalence and containment problems.