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Transducers, Part B: Rational Functions

lax-132576·formalized by Mikołaj Bojańczyk·Aristotle (Harmonic)·created 2026-09-07·GitHub @972ebef·Lean v4.30.0 epoch · mathlib c5ea00351c28

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    Abstract

    Part B of the book Transducers (M. Bojańczyk) as concepts and proofs: the rational relations and the rational functions, one step up the transducer ladder from Mealy machines. The Lean development is Aristotle's formalisation of the book, re-presented in the archive's form; it requires the Part A submission for continuity, Mealy machines and the composition closure, and assumes the undecidability of the Post correspondence problem from the archive's submission on it.

    The definition-concepts are the automata with labelled transitions that underlie the two nondeterministic models, nondeterministic automata with output and the rational relations (B.1.1, B.1.2), rational functions (B.2.1), string homomorphisms, bimachines (B.2.2), the prime rational functions of Theorem B.2.6, finite codes of automata and decidability under a promise, weighted automata (B.3.2) and their codes over Q\mathbb{Q}, sequential and subsequential transducers, the left distance (B.4.7) with bounded variation, and automata with extended transitions.

    The theorem-concepts are the numbered results of Part B: closure of rational relations under composition and their continuity (B.1.4, B.1.5), the undecidability of their equivalence (B.1.6, Griffiths) with the rationality of the complement of a homomorphism (B.1.7), Eilenberg's theorem that rational functions, unambiguous automata and bimachines coincide (B.2.3, as three implications and their conjunction), the elimination of ε\varepsilon-transitions (B.2.4, in its two forms), uniformisation (B.2.5), the decomposition into prime rational functions (B.2.6, both directions and the biconditional), which rational functions are Mealy machines (B.2.7), Schützenberger's decidability of equivalence and of zeroness for weighted automata over Q\mathbb{Q} (B.3.3, B.3.7), decidable equivalence of rational functions (B.3.4), closure of weighted automata under pre-composition with rational functions and the resulting characterisation (B.3.5, B.3.6), and the machine-independent characterisations of Mealy machines (B.4.1, with its decidability B.4.2, B.4.3, B.4.4, B.4.5), of sequential functions (B.4.6, Ginsburg–Rose), of subsequential functions (B.4.8, Choffrut) and of rational functions (B.4.13, Reutenauer–Schützenberger). All are proved.

    Decidability statements are about finite codes of automata over the alphabet N\mathbb{N} and are relativised to the letters a code mentions, since no code describes a total function on all of N\mathbb{N}^*. Definition B.1.3 (rational and recognisable subsets of a monoid) is not formalised; Claims B.4.9–B.4.12 are internal steps of B.4.8 and appear only inside its proof. The exercises of Part B are not part of this submission.

    In the paper

    Concepts

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    Proofs

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    Cite this

    @misc{lax-132576,
      author = {Mikołaj Bojańczyk and Aristotle (Harmonic)},
      title = {Transducers, Part B: Rational Functions},
      year = {2026},
      howpublished = {Lax Archive, lax-132576},
      url = {https://laxarchive.org/lax-132576/},
      note = {draft},
    }

    References

    1. Samuel Eilenberg. Automata, Languages, and Machines. Volume A. Academic Press, 1974.
    2. Marcel-Paul Schützenberger. On the Definition of a Family of Automata. Information and Control 4:245–270, 1961. doi:10.1016/S0019-9958(61)80020-X
    3. Timothy V. Griffiths. The Unsolvability of the Equivalence Problem for Λ\Lambda-Free Nondeterministic Generalized Machines. Journal of the ACM 15(3):409–413, 1968. doi:10.1145/321466.321473
    4. Seymour Ginsburg and Gene F. Rose. A Characterization of Machine Mappings. Canadian Journal of Mathematics 18:381–388, 1966. doi:10.4153/CJM-1966-040-3
    5. Christian Choffrut. Une caractérisation des fonctions séquentielles et des fonctions sous-séquentielles en tant que relations rationnelles. Theoretical Computer Science 5(3):325–337, 1977. doi:10.1016/0304-3975(77)90049-4
    6. Christophe Reutenauer and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger. Minimization of Rational Word Functions. SIAM Journal on Computing 20(4):669–685, 1991. doi:10.1137/0220042
    7. Mikołaj Bojańczyk. Transducers. 2026. Book in preparation; sources at r̆lhttps://github.com/bojanczyk/transducer-book.

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