THE MINIMAL AUTOMATON RECOGNIZING mN IN A LINEAR NUMERATION SYSTEM

We study the structure of automata accepting the greedy representations of N in a wide class of numeration systems. We describe the conditions under which such automata can have more than one strongly connected component and the form of any such additional components. Our characterization applies, in particular, to any automaton arising from a Bertrand numeration system. Furthermore, we show that for any automaton A arising from a system with a dominant root β > 1, there is a morphism mapping A onto the automaton arising from the Bertrand system associated with the number β. Under some mild assumptions, we also study the state complexity of the trim minimal automaton accepting the greedy representations of the multiples of m ≥ 2 for a wide class of linear numeration systems. As an example, the number of states of the trim minimal automaton accepting the greedy representations of mN in the Fibonacci system is exactly 2m2. 1This author is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science of the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Waterloo. INTEGERS: 11B (2011) 2