Existential Length Universality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the following natural variation on the classical universality problem: given a language L(M) represented by M (e.g., a DFA/RE/NFA/PDA), does there exist an integer ? ≥ 0 such that Σ^? ⊆ L(M)? In the case of an NFA, we show that this problem is NEXPTIME-complete, and the smallest such ? can be doubly exponential in the number of states. This particular case was formulated as an open problem in 2009, and our solution uses a novel and involved construction. In the case of a PDA, we show that it is recursively unsolvable, while the smallest such ? is not bounded by any computable function of the number of states. In the case of a DFA, we show that the problem is NP-complete, and e^{√{n log n} (1+o(1))} is an asymptotically tight upper bound for the smallest such ?, where n is the number of states. Finally, we prove that in all these cases, the problem becomes computationally easier when the length ? is also given in binary in the input: it is polynomially solvable for a DFA, PSPACE-complete for an NFA, and co-NEXPTIME-complete for a PDA.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".