Time Complexity of Regular Languages

Question

I wonder how I can go about proving that if a language L is decidable in o(nlog(n)) then L must be regular.

I should probably mention that by "decidable" I mean "being decidable by single-tape deterministic turing machine".

Thanks and regards Guillermo

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 09 '19 at 15:23

This is a classical result of Kobayashi, On the structure of one-tape nondeterministic Turing machine time hierarchy, Theorem 3.3 on page 188. The idea is to use crossing sequences: you show an upper bound $O(1)$ on the size of any crossing sequence, and then use an argument of Hennie, One-tape off-line Turing machine computations, Theorem 2 on page 561, to conclude that the language accepted by the machine is regular.

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