State Complexity of Insertion

Abstract

It is well known that the resulting language obtained by inserting a regular language to a regular language is regular. We study the nondeterministic and deterministic state complexity of the insertion operation. Given two incomplete DFAs of sizes m and n, we give an upper bound (m+2)·2mn−m−1·3m and find a lower bound for an asymp-totically tight bound. We also present the tight nondeterministic state complexity by a fooling set technique. The deterministic state complexity of insertion is 2Θ(mn) and the nondeterministic state complexity of insertion is precisely mn+2m, where m and n are the size of input finite automata. We also consider the state complexity of insertion in the case where the inserted language is bifix-free or non-returning.