From determinism to non-determinism in recognizable two-dimensional languages

Abstract

Tiling systems that recognize two-dimensional languages are intrinsically non-deterministic models. We introduce the notion of deterministic tiling system that generalizes deterministic automata for strings. The corresponding family of languages matches all the requirements of a robust deterministic class. Furthermore we show that, differently from the one-dimensional case, there exist many classes between deterministic and non-deterministic families that we separate by means of examples and decidability properties. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.