Better Complexity Bounds for Cost Register Automata
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cost register automata (CRAs) are one-way finite automata whose transitions have the side-effect that a register is set to the result of applying a state-dependent semiring operation to a pair of registers. Here it is shown that CRAs over the tropical semiring can simulate polynomial time computation, proving along the way that a naturally dened width-k circuit value problem over the tropical semiring is P-complete. Then the copyless variant of the CRA, requiring that semiring operations be applied to distinct registers, is shown no more powerful than NC^1 when the semiring is the integers, or strings with operations max and concat. This relates questions left open in recent work on the complexity of CRA-computable functions to long-standing class separation conjectures in complexity theory, such as NC versus P and NC^1 versus GapNC^1.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 it