State Complexity of Reversible Watson-Crick Automata

TL;DR

This paper investigates the state complexity of reversible Watson-Crick automata, revealing they have an advantage over nondeterministic finite automata despite the exponential state increase when converting to deterministic models.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of state complexity for reversible Watson-Crick automata, showing their efficiency compared to nondeterministic finite automata.

Findings

Reversible Watson-Crick automata outperform nondeterministic finite automata in state complexity.

Conversion to deterministic automata causes exponential state blow-up.

Reversibility does not negate the state complexity advantage.

Abstract

Reversible Watson-Crick automata introduced by Chatterjee et.al. is a reversible variant of an Watson-Crick automata. It has already been shown that the addition of DNA properties to reversible automata significantly increases the computational power of the model. In this paper, we analyze the state complexity of Reversible Watson-Crick automata with respect to non-deterministic finite automata. We show that Reversible Watson-Crick automata in spite of being reversible in nature enjoy state complexity advantage over non deterministic finite automata. The result is interesting because conversion from non deterministic to deterministic automata results in exponential blow up of the number of states and classically increase in number of heads of the automata cannot compensate for non-determinism in deterministic and reversible models.