Let A and B be two affinely generating sets of ℤ2n. As usual, we denote their Minkowski sum by A+B. How small can A+B be, given the cardinalities of A and B? We give a tight answer to this question. Our bound is attained when both A and B are unions of cosets of a certain subgroup of ℤ2n. These cosets are arranged as Hamming balls, the smaller of which has radius 1.

By similar methods, we re-prove the Freiman–Ruzsa theorem in ℤ2n, with an optimal upper bound. Denote by F(K) the maximal spanning constant |〈 A 〉|/|A| over all subsets A ⊆ ℤ2n with doubling constant |A+A|/|A| ≤ K. We explicitly calculate F(K), and in particular show that 4K/4K ≤ F(K)⋅(1+o(1)) ≤ 4K/2K. This improves the estimate F(K) = poly(K)4K, found recently by Green and Tao [17] and by Konyagin [23].

The Parikh finite word automaton (PA) was introduced and studied in 2003 by Klaedtke andRueß. Natural variants of the PA arise from viewing a PA equivalently as an automaton thatkeeps a count of its transitions and semilinearly constrains their numbers. Here we adoptthis view and define the affine PA, that extends the PA by having eachtransition induce an affine transformation on the PA registers, and the PA onletters, that restricts the PA by forcing any two transitions on the sameletter to affect the registers equally. Then we report on the expressiveness, closure, anddecidability properties of such PA variants. We note that deterministic PA are strictlyweaker than deterministic reversal-bounded counter machines.

We investigate the possibility of extending Chrobak normal form to the probabilisticcase. While in the nondeterministic case a unary automaton can be simulated by anautomaton in Chrobak normal form without increasing the number of the states in thecycles, we show that in the probabilistic case the simulation is not possible by keepingthe same number of ergodic states. This negative result is proved by considering thenatural extension to the probabilistic case of Chrobak normal form, obtained by replacingnondeterministic choices with probabilistic choices. We then propose a different kind ofnormal form, namely, cyclic normal form, which does not suffer from the same problem: weprove that each unary probabilistic automaton can be simulated by a probabilisticautomaton in cyclic normal form, with at most the same number of ergodic states. In thenondeterministic case there are trivial simulations between Chrobak normal form and cyclicnormal form, preserving the total number of states in the automata and in theircycles.

LetLϕ,λ = {ω ∈ Σ∗| ϕ(ω) > λ} be thelanguage recognized by a formal seriesϕ:Σ∗ → ℝ with isolated cut pointλ. We provide new conditions that guarantee the regularity of thelanguage Lϕ,λ in the case thatϕ is rational or ϕ is a Hadamard quotient of rationalseries. Moreover the decidability property of such conditions is investigated.

We introduce and investigate string assembling systems which form a computational model that generates strings from copies out of a finite set of assembly units. The underlying mechanism is based on piecewise assembly of a double-stranded sequence of symbols, where the upper and lower strand have to match. The generation is additionally controlled by the requirement that the first symbol of a unit has to be the same as the last symbol of the strand generated so far, as well as by the distinction of assembly units that may appear at the beginning, during, and at the end of the assembling process. We start to explore the generative capacity of string assembling systems. In particular, we prove that any such system can be simulated by some nondeterministic one-way two-head finite automaton, while the stateless version of the two-head finite automaton marks to some extent a lower bound for the generative capacity. Moreover, we obtain several incomparability and undecidability results as well as (non-)closure properties, and present questions for further investigations.

Given a prime q and a negative discriminant D, the CM method constructs an elliptic curve E/Fq by obtaining a root of the Hilbert class polynomial HD(X) modulo q. We consider an approach based on a decomposition of the ring class field defined by HD, which we adapt to a CRT setting. This yields two algorithms, each of which obtains a root of HD mod q without necessarily computing any of its coefficients. Heuristically, our approach uses asymptotically less time and space than the standard CM method for almost all D. Under the GRH, and reasonable assumptions about the size of log q relative to ∣D∣, we achieve a space complexity of O((m+n)log q)bits, where mn=h(D) , which may be as small as O(∣D∣1/4 log q) . The practical efficiency of the algorithms is demonstrated using ∣D∣>1016 and q≈2256, and also ∣D∣>1015 and q≈233220. These examples are both an order of magnitude larger than the best previous results obtained with the CM method.

We describe an effective algorithm to compute a set of representatives for the conjugacy classes of Hall subgroups of a finite permutation or matrix group. Our algorithm uses the general approach of the so-called ‘trivial Fitting model’.

The problem of acoustic noise is becoming increasingly serious with the growing use of industrial and medical equipment, appliances, and consumer electronics. Active noise control (ANC), based on the principle of superposition, was developed in the early 20th century to help reduce noise. However, ANC is still not widely used owing to the effectiveness of control algorithms, and to the physical and economical constraints of practical applications. In this paper, we briefly introduce some fundamental ANC algorithms and theoretical analyses, and focus on recent advances on signal processing algorithms, implementation techniques, challenges for innovative applications, and open issues for further research and development of ANC systems.