The Post Correspondence Problem and Equalisers for Certain Free Group and Monoid Morphisms Laura Ciobanu Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
[email protected] Alan D. Logan Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
[email protected] Abstract A marked free monoid morphism is a morphism for which the image of each generator starts with a different letter, and immersions are the analogous maps in free groups. We show that the (simultaneous) PCP is decidable for immersions of free groups, and provide an algorithm to compute bases for the sets, called equalisers, on which the immersions take the same values. We also answer a question of Stallings about the rank of the equaliser. Analogous results are proven for marked morphisms of free monoids. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → Formal languages and automata theory; Theory of computation → Complexity classes; Mathematics of computing → Combinatorics on words; Mathematics of computing → Combinatorial algorithms Keywords and phrases Post Correspondence Problem, marked map, immersion, free group, free monoid Digital Object Identifier 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2020.120 Category Track B: Automata, Logic, Semantics, and Theory of Programming Related Version https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.07574 Funding Research supported by EPSRC grant EP/R035814/1. 1 Introduction In this paper we prove results about the classical Post Correspondence Problem (PCPFM), which we state in terms of equalisers of free monoid morphisms, and the analogue problem PCPFG for free groups ([5], [19]), and we describe the solutions to PCPFM and PCPFG for certain classes of morphisms. While the classical PCPFM is famously undecidable for arbitrary maps of free monoids [21] (see also the survey [12] and the recent result of Neary [20]), PCPFG for free groups is an important open question [8, Problem 5.1.4].