Measures of nondeterminism for pushdown automata

摘要

D. Vermeir and W. Savitch (Fund. Inform. 4 (1981), 401–418) introduced two measures of nondeterminism for pushdown automata and showed interestingly that the second measure, which we refer to as the depth measure, yields an infinite hierarchy of language families between the deterministic context-free and general context-free languages. However, the proof given in op. cit. for this hierarchy theorem was incorrect. In this paper, using a pumping result for deterministic context-free languages we give a new proof for the strictness of the depth hierarchy. We introduce the monadic depth measure which is also shown to give rise to an infinite hierarchy of language families. Furthermore, we show that the monadic hierarchy is shifted by at most one level from the unrestricted depth hierarchy.