OPEN PROBLEMS ABOUT REGULAR LANGUAGES

Abstract

The theory of regular languages and finite automata was developed in the early 1950s and is one of the oldest branches of theoretical computer science. Regular languages constitute the best known family of formal languages, and finite automata constitute the best known family of abstract machine models. The concepts of regular languages and finite automata appear frequently in theoretical computer science and have several important applications. There is a vast literature on these subjects. Despite the fact that many researchers have worked in this field, there remain several difficult open problems. The chapter discusses six of these problems. These problems are of fundamental importance and considerable difficulty. Most of them are intimately involved with the fundamental property of finite automata, namely finiteness. In a monograph published in 1971, McNaughton and Papert included a collection of open problems concerning regular languages. Their list is headed by the star height problem and until now, no progress has been made on such an intriguing question. The bounds on star height apply only to languages whose syntactic monoids are groups. In that case, the corresponding semiautomata are permutation semiautomata.