Restarting tiling automata

Abstract

We present a new model of a two-dimensional computing device called restarting tiling automaton. The automaton defines a set of tile-rewriting, weight-reducing rules and a scanning strategy by which a tile to rewrite is being searched. We investigate properties of the induced families of picture languages. Special attention is paid to picture languages that can be accepted independently of the scanning strategy. We show that this family strictly includes REC and exhibits similar closure properties. Moreover, we prove that its intersection with the set of one-row languages coincides with the regular languages. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.