Hierarchies of Stateless Multicounter 5′ → 3′ Watson-Crick Automata Languages

We consider stateless counter machines which mix the features of one-head counter machines and a special type of two-head Watson-Crick automata (WK-automata). Our Watson-Crick counter machines are biologically motivated. They have two heads that read the input starting from the two extremes. The reading process is finished when there are no more symbols between the heads, i.e., every letter of the input is processed by either head. Depending on whether the heads are required to advance at each move, we distinguish between realtime and non-realtime machines. If every counter makes at most k alternations between nondecreasing and decreasing modes in every computation, then the machine is k-reversal. It is reversal bounded if it is k-reversal for some k. In this paper we concentrate on the properties of both deterministic and nondeterministic stateless WK-automata with reversal bounded counters.