STATE COMPLEXITY AND APPROXIMATION

Abstract

We discuss a number of essential questions concerning the state complexity research. The questions include why many basic problems were not studied earlier, whether there is a general algorithm for state complexity of combined operations, and whether there is a new and effective approach in this area of research. The concept of state complexity approximation is also discussed. We show that state complexity approximation can be used to obtain good results when the exact state complexities are difficult to find and when the exact state complexities are too complex to comprehend. We also list a number of questions for future research in this area.