# All Questions

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### Is there a regular tree language in which the average height of a tree of size $n$ is neither $\Theta(n)$ nor $\Theta(\sqrt{n})$?

We define a regular tree language as in the book TATA: It is the set of trees accepted by a non-deterministic finite tree automaton (Chapter 1) or, equivalently, the set of trees generated by a ...
548 views

### Finding an $st$-path in a planar graph which is adjacent to the fewest number of faces

I am curious whether the following problems has been studied before, but wasn't able to find any papers about it: Given a planar graph $G$, and two vertices $s$ and $t$, find an $s$-$t$ path $P$ ...
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### Is it NP-hard to fill up bins with minimum moves?

There are $n$ bins and $m$ type of balls. The $i$th bin has labels $a_{i,j}$ for $1\leq j\leq m$, it is the expected number of balls of type $j$. You start with $b_j$ balls of type $j$. Each ball of ...
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### Largest set of cocircular points

Given $n$ points with integer coordinates in the plane, determine the maximum number of points that lie on the same circle (on its circumference, not its interior). This can be done in $O(n^3)$ ...
808 views

### Can a calculus have incremental copying and closed scopes?

A few days ago, I proposed the Abstract Calculus, a minimal untyped language that is very similar to the Lambda Calculus, except for the main difference that substitutions are ...
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### Compression of domain names

I am curious as to how one might very compactly compress the domain of an arbitrary IDN hostname (as defined by RFC5890) and suspect this could become an interesting challenge. A Unicode host or ...
500 views

### Approximate minimum-weighted tree decomposition on complete graphs

Say I have a weighted undirected complete graph $G = (V, E)$. Each edge $e = (u, v, w)$ is assigned with a positive weight $w$. I want to calculate the minimum-weighted $(d, h)$-tree-decomposition. By ...
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### Why hasn't functional programming researched dynamic trees?

Dynamic trees play an important role in solving problems such as network flows, dynamic graphs, combinatorial problems ("Dynamic Trees in Practice" by Tarjan and Werneck) and recently merging ...
1k views

### Could min cut be easier than network flow?

Thanks to the max-flow min-cut theorem, we know that we can use any algorithm to compute a maximum flow in a network graph to compute a $(s,t)$-min-cut. Therefore, the complexity of computing a ...
415 views

### Is finding a weight-balanced tree NP-hard?

In the following, we consider binary trees where only the leaves have weights. Let $T$ be a binary tree and $W(T)$ be the sum of the weights of its leaves. Let $T.l$ and $T.r$ be the left child and ...
596 views

### Steps that guarantee exiting a maze

Given a 2-dimensional maze where you can give 4 commands "move up/down/right/left". Knowing the maze but not where the person is, how to find the minimum sequence of commands that guarantees exiting ...
299 views

### Is the two-color leapfrog problem in P?

My question is whether a specific decision problem is in P or not. It's straightforwardly in NP. The decision problem is a specific case of the general $k$-color leapfrog problem. I can already show ...
565 views

### Is the language of words that are unbalanced in the first half context-free?

(Practice exam question in computational models) Definition: A word $w\in \{0,1\}^*$ is called balanced if it contains the same number of $0$s as $1$s. Let $L = \{w\in \{0,1\}^*\mid |w|$ is even and ...
245 views

### Using logic to prove non-regularity of a language

A language $L$ is regular if and only if it is definiable by a sentence in monadic second order logic (MSO) over strings (J.R. Buchi, Weak second-order arithmetic and Finite automata; Z. Math. Logik ...
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### What can be proven regarding the differences in power between unary ECMAScript regex functions and primitive recursive functions?

In 2014, inspired by Regex Golf, I started exploring, along with a mathematician going by the name teukon, what could be done in the unary domain in ECMAScript regex that went significantly beyond ...
704 views

### Flow graph that requires pushing back flow in Ford Fulkerson

Does there exist a flow graph that always requires flow to be pushed back no matter what ordering of augmenting paths is chosen in Ford Fulkerson? Let's assume we use the standard procedure of ...
202 views

### Why do we have to forbid non-conforming lower and upper type bounds?

(it's a repost of my unanswered question from scala-user@googlegroups.com about Scala) In the Scala Language Specification, §4.4 Type Parameters, there is a requirement: The most general form of a ...
394 views

### Choosing a subset of binary variables to maximize the sum of the highest $K$

Consider the following problem: Input: integers $n > m > k$; $n$ numbers $0 \leq p_1, \ldots, p_n \leq 1$; $n$ numbers $r_1, \ldots, r_n$ where ($r_i \geq 0$). Let $X_1,\dots,X_n$ be $n$ ...
628 views

### Test whether two languages are equal, when give in algebraic form

This sub-problem is motivated by Algorithm to test whether a language is regular. Suppose we have two languages $L_1,L_2$ that are expressed in "algebraic" form, as formalized below. I want to ...
224 views

### Is extensionality for coinductive datatypes consistent with Coq's logic?

Given a coinductive datatype, one can usually (always?) define a bisimulation as the largest equivalence relation over it. I would like to add an axiom stating that if two members of the type are ...
577 views

### The difference between dynamic logic and temporal logic

To find the difference, I'd just encountered with assertions below about temporal logic in Wikipedia: another variant of modal logic sharing many common features with dynamic logic, differs from ...
760 views

### Optimal meeting point in directed graph

Let $G(V, E)$ be a edge-weighted directed connected graph and $v_1, \dots, v_n \in V$ be some vertices. Let $d(a, b)$ denote the length of the shortest path from $a$ to $b$, for $a,b \in V$. I need ...
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### Regularity profiles

A standard exercise in formal language theory uses Lagrange's four-square theorem to construct a language $L$ such that $L$ isn't regular but $L^2$ is regular. (Let $A = \{ a^{n^2} : n \geq 0 \}$. ...
106 views

### Can we say McCarthy and Hoare had the same objective in the 60s regarding a mathematical theory of computation?

I don't think there's any way to ask a very precise question here, so this might be considered opinion based. Nevertheless, it seems the question is clear enough because I'm asking whether these two ...
183 views

### Constructing a connected graph with given degree sequence

I am interested in constructing simple connected graphs where each vertex has a fixed number of edges (degree) ahead of time. I had originally assume I could use some modification of the Havel-Hakimi ...
560 views

### Advantages of algorithm W over algorithm J for type inference in Hindley-Milner type system

According to A modern eye on ML type inference Furthermore, for some unknown reason, W appears to have become more popular than J, even though the latter is viewed—with reason!—by Milner as ...
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### Is Agda sound as a proof system?

I was browsing Agda's stdlib source code, since I was trying to get into it seriously and therefore wanted to know more. I was amazed at that Agda is way more developed than I thought and it's ...
161 views

### When can you "invert" an equation in the lambda calculus

Suppose that $M$ is a full model of the simply typed lambda calculus. Suppose each base type is infinite. Now suppose that $f$ and $g$ are two functions in $M$ (not necessarily in the same domain) ...
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### Minimum edge deletion partitioning of a planar graph

I'm interested in the time complexity of the following problem: Given an undirected planar graph $G=(V,E)$ and a weight function $w:E \rightarrow \mathbb{Z}$ (so weights can be negative, too), color ...
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### Complexity class for probabilistic approximation algorithms with bounded error

What's the name of a complexity class of optimization problems that have "bounded error probabilistic approximation algorithms"? Bounded error probabilistic version of APX (as BPP is bounded error ...
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### Does Automatic Differentiation handle conditional branches, if yes how?

I'm trying to understand how Automatic Differentiation (AD) works. For simple algebraic operation, I get the chain rule thing. But, when the code contains conditional statement like ...
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### (Slightly) faster simulation of quantum Fourier transform

Suppose I want to write a classical software simulator of a quantum circuit with $N$ qubits. When it comes time to simulate the quantum Fourier transform I can evaluate all $2^N$ states to determine ...
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### Shift-resolve parsing - questions

I've recently came across a paper describing the parsing technique mentioned in the title. Unfortunately, the terminology used in said paper is somewhat beyond my comprehension, so I've been ...
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### Universal Turing Machine simulation with bounded time overhead

Is it possible to design a Universal Turing Machine in which the simulation time of a given Turing Machine $M$ is bounded by a factor of $\mathcal{O}(\log|\Gamma|+\log|Q|)$ of the original running-...
207 views

### "Essential" problem for MA

I am trying to understand different interactive proof systems, in particular AM and MA. Is there a typical problem for the complexity class MA as Graph-NonIsomorphism problem is for AM? Is there ...
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### Applying the graph mining algorithm Leap Search in an unlabeled setting

I am reading Mining Significant Graph Patterns by Leap Search (Yan et al., 2008), and I am unclear on how their technique translates to the unlabeled setting, since $p$ and $q$ (the frequency ...
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### Finding the longest repeating subsequence

Given a string $s$, I would like to find the longest repeating (at least twice) subsequence. That is, I would like to find a string $w$ which is a subsequence (doesn't have to be a contiguous) of $s$ ...
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### Are there consequences for P ≠ NP that are unintuitive?

It's often regarded that the most intuitive answer to the question of $P$ vs $NP$ is that $P ≠ NP$. This is often illustrated with some consequences that would follow if $P = NP$ were true. Things ...
### How can the shortest traveling salesman tour be found in $O(2^n poly(n))$ time and less than exponential space?
I'm stuck on problem 9.4 from The Nature of Computation which reads: Dynamic Salesman. A naive search algorithm for TSP takes $O(n!)$ time to check all tours. Use dynamic programming to reduce this ...