Shaull Almagor ; Neta Dafni ; Ishai Salgado - Quantitative Semantics for Jumping Automata

lmcs:15432 - Logical Methods in Computer Science, December 30, 2025, Volume 21, Issue 4 - https://doi.org/10.46298/lmcs-21(4:31)2025
Quantitative Semantics for Jumping AutomataArticle

Authors: Shaull Almagor ; Neta Dafni ; Ishai Salgado

    Jumping automata are finite automata that read their input in a non-sequential manner, by allowing a reading head to ``jump'' between positions on the input, consuming a permutation of the input word. We argue that allowing the head to jump should incur some cost. To this end, we propose four quantitative semantics for jumping automata, whereby the jumps of the head in an accepting run define the cost of the run. The four semantics correspond to different interpretations of jumps: the \emph{absolute distance} semantics counts the distance the head jumps, the \emph{reversal} semantics counts the number of times the head changes direction, the \emph{Hamming distance} measures the number of letter-swaps the run makes, and the \emph{maximum jump} semantics counts the maximal distance the head jumps in a single step,

    We study these measures, with the main focus being the \emph{boundedness problem}: given a jumping automaton, decide whether its (quantitative) language is bounded by some given number $k$. We establish the decidability and complexity for this problem under several variants.


    Volume: Volume 21, Issue 4
    Published on: December 30, 2025
    Accepted on: October 13, 2025
    Submitted on: March 27, 2025
    Keywords: Formal Languages and Automata Theory, Logic in Computer Science

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