ON THE POWER OF ONE-WAY SYNCHRONIZED ALTERNATING MACHINES WITH SMALL SPACE

Abstract

This paper continues the investigation of the concept of synchronized alternation. The open problems from Ref. 4 are solved by showing that one-way synchronized alternating (multihead) automata are as powerful as two-way ones. More precisely it is shown that: (i) one-way synchronized alternating finite automata recognize exactly context-sensitive languages, and (ii) NSPACE(nk) is exactly the family of languages recognized by one-way (two-way) synchronized alternating k-head finite automata, for k≥1. Finaly, the synchronization complexity of one-way synchronized Turing machines (1satm's) is investigated and an infinite hierarchy among classes of sets accepted by 1satm's with space and synchronization bounds between log log n and log n is established. Some closure properties of the classes in this hierarchy are also proved.