Running time complexity of printing an acyclic automaton

Abstract

This article estimates the worst-case running time complexity for traversing and printing all successful paths of a normalized trim acyclic automaton. First, we show that the worst-case structure is a festoon with distribution of arcs on states as uniform as possible. Then, we prove that the complexity is maximum when we have a distribution of e (Napier constant) outgoing arcs per state on average, and that it can be exponential in the number of arcs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.