Zero-One Law for Regular Languages and Semigroups with Zero

Abstract

A regular language has the zero-one law if its asymptotic density converges to either zero or one. We prove that the class of all zero-one languages is closed under Boolean operations and quotients. Moreover, we prove that a regular language has the zero-one law if and only if its syntactic monoid has a zero element. Our proof gives both algebraic and automata characterisation of the zero-one law for regular languages, and it leads the following two corollaries: (i) There is an O(n log n) algorithm for testing whether a given regular language has the zero-one law. (ii) The Boolean closure of existential first-order logic over finite words has the zero-one law.