On the Iterated Hairpin Completion

The (bounded) hairpin completion and its iterated versions are operations on formal languages which have been inspired by the hairpin formation in DNA-biochemistry. The paper answers two questions asked in the literature about the iterated hairpin completion. The first question is whether the class of regular languages is closed under iterated bounded hairpin completion. Here we show that this is true by providing a more general result which applies to all the classes of languages which are closed under finite union, intersection with regular sets, and concatenation with regular sets. In particular, all Chomsky classes and all standard complexity classes are closed under iterated bounded hairpin completion. In the second part of the paper we address the question whether the iterated hairpin completion of a singleton is always regular. In contrast to the first question, this one has a negative answer. We exhibit an example of a singleton language whose iterated hairpin completion is not regular, actually it is not context-free, but context-sensitive.