Semilinear Sets and Counter Machines : a Brief Survey

Semilinear sets are one of the most important concepts in theoretical computer science, as illustrated by the fact that the set of nonnegative integer solutions to any system of Diophantine equations is semilinear. Parikh’s theorem enables us to represent any semilinear set as a pushdown automaton (PDA).We summarize recent results on the descriptional complexity of conversions among different representations of a semilinear set: as a vector set (conventional), a finite automaton (FA), a PDA, etc.. We also discuss semilinearity-preserving operations like union, intersection, and complement. We use Parikh’s theorem to enlarge the class of finite-state machines that can represent semilinear sets. In particular, we give a simpler proof of a known result that characterizes semilinear sets in terms of machines with reversal-bounded counters. We then investigate the power of such a machine with only one counter in the context of a long-standing conjecture about repetition on words.