Succinctness of the Complement and Intersection of Regular Expressions Wouter Gelade, Frank Neven To cite this version: Wouter Gelade, Frank Neven. Succinctness of the Complement and Intersection of Regular Expres- sions. STACS 2008, Feb 2008, Bordeaux, France. pp.325-336. hal-00226864 HAL Id: hal-00226864 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00226864 Submitted on 30 Jan 2008 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science 2008 (Bordeaux), pp. 325-336 www.stacs-conf.org SUCCINCTNESS OF THE COMPLEMENT AND INTERSECTION OF REGULAR EXPRESSIONS WOUTER GELADE AND FRANK NEVEN Hasselt University and Transnational University of Limburg, School for Information Technology E-mail address:
[email protected] Abstract. We study the succinctness of the complement and intersection of regular ex- pressions. In particular, we show that when constructing a regular expression defining the complement of a given regular expression, a double exponential size increase cannot be avoided. Similarly, when constructing a regular expression defining the intersection of a fixed and an arbitrary number of regular expressions, an exponential and double expo- nential size increase, respectively, can in worst-case not be avoided.