Interleaving of path sets

Abstract

Path sets are spaces of one-sided infinite symbol sequences corresponding to the one-sided infinite walks beginning at a fixed initial vertex in a directed labeled graph. Path sets are a generalization of one-sided sofic shifts. This paper studies decimation operations $\psi_{j, n}(\cdot)$ which extract symbol sequences in infinite arithmetic progressions (mod n). starting with the symbol at position j. It also studies a family of n-ary interleaving operations, one for each arity n, which act on an ordered set $(X_0, X_1, ..., X_{n-1})$ of one-sided symbol sequences on a finite alphabet A, to produce a set $X$ of all output sequences obtained by interleaving the symbols of words $x_i$ in each $X_i$ in arithmetic progressions (mod n). It studies a set of closure operations relating interleaving and decimation. It reviews basic algorithmic results on presentations of path sets and existence of a minimal right-resolving presentation. It gives an algorithm for computing presentations of decimations of path sets from presentations of path sets, showing the minimal right-resolving presentation of $\psi_{j,n}(X)$ has at most one more vertex than a minimal right-resolving presentation of X. It shows that a path set has only finitely many distinct decimations. It shows the class of path sets on a fixed alphabet is closed under all interleaving operations, and gives algorithms for computing presentations of n-fold interleavings of given sets $X_i$. It studies interleaving factorizations and classifies path sets that have infinite interleaving factorizations, and gives an algorithm to recognize them. It shows a finiteness of a process of iterated interleaving factorizations, which "freezes" factors that have infinite interleavings.