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Given two regular languages (fx given by it's accepting regular expression), is there an algorithm to determine if one is a subset of the other?

D.W.
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skyking
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1 Answers1

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Yes, there is an algorithm for it, but there is unlikely to be an efficient algorithm.

Notice that you can convert between a regular expression and a NFA in polynomial time. Moreover, determining whether one regular language is a subset of another, if both are represented as NFAs, is PSPACE-complete. Therefore, there is unlikely to be a polynomial-time algorithm for this, unless there is a huge surprise in complexity theory.

See Is there an efficient test for if an NFA accepts a subset of another NFA?. Related: Is language decideable (subset)?.

D.W.
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