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arXiv · 2506.14072

A generalization of Deterministic Finite Automata related to discharging

John M. Campbell
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Abstract

Deterministic Finite Automata (DFAs) are of central importance in automata theory. In view of how state diagrams for DFAs are defined using directed graphs, this leads us to introduce a generalization of DFAs related to a method widely used in graph theory referred to as the discharging method. Given a DFA $(Q, Σ, δ, q_{0}, F)$, the transition function $δ\colon Q \times Σ\to Q$ determines a directed path in the corresponding state diagram based on an input string $a_{1} a_{2} \cdots a_{n}$ consisting of characters in $Σ$, and our generalization can be thought of as being based on how each vertex in $D$ ''discharges'' rational values to adjacent vertices (by analogy with the discharging method) depending on the string $a_{1} a_{2} \cdots a_{n}$ and according to a fixed set of rules. We formalize this notion and pursue an exploration of the notion of a Discharging Deterministic Finite Automaton (DDFA) introduced in this paper. Our DDFA construction gives rise to a ring structure consisting of sequences that we refer to as being quasi-$k$-regular, and this ring generalizes the ring of $k$-regular sequences introduced by Allouche and Shallit.

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John M. Campbell. 2025-06-17. A generalization of Deterministic Finite Automata related to discharging. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14072

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