We investigate the power of non-determinism in purely functional programming languages with higher-order types. Specifically, we consider cons-free programs of varying data orders, equipped with explicit non-deterministic choice. Cons-freeness roughly means that data constructors cannot occur in function bodies and all manipulation of storage space thus has to happen indirectly using the call stack. While cons-free programs have previously been used by several au thors to characterise complexity classes, the work on non-deterministic programs has almost exclusively considered programs of data order 0. Previous work has shown that adding explicit non-determinism to cons-free programs taking data of order 0 does not increase expressivity; we prove that this - dramatically - is not the case for higher data orders: adding non-determinism to programs with data order at least 1 allows for a characterisation of the entire class of elementary-time decidable sets.
Characterisation of non-deterministic complexity classes via programming languages remains a largely unexplored area. Bellantoni obtained a characterisation of @math in his dissertation @cite_4 using similar approaches as @cite_13 , but at the cost of having a minimisation operator (as in recursion theory), a restriction later removed by Oitavem @cite_12 . A general framework for implicitly characterising a larger hierarchy of non-deterministic classes remains an open problem.
@cite_13 @cite_4 @cite_12
2069792094 2016014073
Weighted automata are a generalisation of non-deterministic automata where each transition, in addition to an input letter, has also a quantity expressing the weight (e.g. cost or probability) of its execution. As for non-deterministic automata, their behaviours can be expressed in terms of either (weighted) bisimilarity or (weighted) language equivalence. Coalgebras provide a categorical framework for the uniform study of state-based systems and their behaviours. In this work, we show that coalgebras can suitably model weighted automata in two different ways: coalgebras on Set (the category of sets and functions) characterise weighted bisimilarity, while coalgebras on Vect (the category of vector spaces and linear maps) characterise weighted language equivalence. Relying on the second characterisation, we show three different procedures for computing weighted language equivalence. The first one consists in a generalisation of the usual partition refinement algorithm for ordinary automata. The second one is the backward version of the first one. The third procedure relies on a syntactic representation of rational weighted languages. We study the effect of polynomial interpretation termination proofs of deterministic (resp. non-deterministic) algorithms defined by con uent (resp. non-con uent) rewrite systems over data structures which include strings, lists and trees, and we classify them according to the interpretations of the constructors. This leads to the definition of six function classes which turn out to be exactly the deterministic (resp. non-deterministic) polynomial time, linear exponential time and linear doubly exponential time computable functions when the class is based on con uent (resp. non-con uent) rewrite systems. We also obtain a characterisation of the linear space computable functions. Finally, we demonstrate that functions with exponential interpretation termination proofs are super-elementary. We investigate the minimization of Newton's functional for the problem of the body of minimal resistance with maximal height @math cite butt in the class of convex developable functions defined in a disc. This class is a natural candidate to find a (non-radial) minimizer in accordance with the results of cite lrp2. We prove that the minimizer in this class has a minimal set in the form of a regular polygon with @math sides centered in the disc, and numerical experiments indicate that the natural number @math is a non-decreasing function of @math . The corresponding functions all achieve a lower value of the functional than the optimal radially symmetric function with the same height @math .