CS 719 Tutorial-1

1. Find an example of a regular language where the syntactic right con-

gruence and the syntactic congruence are not identical.

2. Two semigroups are said be isomorphic if there exists a bijective mor-

phism between them. Similarly, two monoids (M, ·, e) and (N, ?, f ) are
isomorphic if there exists a bijective monoid morphism h : M → N
(note that, in a monoid morphism, h(e) = f ). Show that, upto iso-
morphism, there are 5 semigroups with 2 elements. Describe all non-
isomorphic monoids with atmost three elements.

3. Fix a semigroup S. Show that 2S (the power-set of S) is also a semi-

group, for the binary operation: for X, Y ∈ 2S ,

XY = {xy|x ∈ X, y ∈ Y }

4. Let M be a monoid and m be an element of M . Show that the operation

◦ defined on the set mM ∩ M m by xm ◦ my = xmy is well defined.
Show that (mM ∩ M m, ◦, m) is a monoid.

5. Two words x and y are powers of the same word if there exists a word z
such that x = z n and y = z m for some m, n ≥ 0. Show that two words
commute (that is, xy = yx) iff they are powers of the same word.

6. Two words x and y are conjugate if they are of the form x = uv and
y = vu for some words u and v.

• Show that x and y are conjugate if there exists a word z such that
xz = zy.
• Show that conjugacy relation is an equivalence relation.

7. Compute the minimal automaton of the language (a(ab)∗ b)∗ .

8. Compute the syntactic monoid of the following languages on the alpha-

bet A = {a, b}:

• {aba, b}
• A∗ aaA∗

You should describe it as a transition/transformation monoid. Also,

describe it using generators and relations.

9. Let L ⊂ Σ∗ , a ∈ Σ and u, v, z ∈ Σ∗ . Show that if z ∼L zu ∼L zv,

then zu2 ∼LaΣ∗ zu and zuv ∼LaΣ∗ zvu. Recall that ∼M is the syntactic
congruence associated with the language M .

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10. Let S be a semigroup and x ∈ S. Let i be the index of x and p
be its period. Hence hxi, the subsemigroup of S generated by x, is
hxi = {x, x2 , . . . , xi , xi+1 , . . . , xi+p−1 } and xi+p = xi . Observe that hxi
has exactly i + p − 1 elements. Show that, hxi has a unique idem-
potent element. Also, show that the subset {xi , xi+1 , . . . , xi+p−1 } is a
semigroup of S which is also a group.

11. Let X be a set. A preorder ≤ on X is a binary relation on X which is

reflexive and transitive. Define a relation ∼ on X as follows:

x ∼ y iff x ≤ y and y ≤ x

Show that ∼ is an equivalence relation on X. Let Y = X/ ∼ be the

quotient of X by ∼. Define a relation v on Y as follows:

[x]∼ v [y]∼ iff x ≤ y

Show that v is well-defined and is a partial-order on Y .

12. Let R1 and R2 be equivalence relations on X which commute, that is

R1 ◦ R2 = R2 ◦ R1 . Show that R = R1 ◦ R2 is an equivalence relation.
Let X be an R-equivalence class. Prove that,

• X is a disjoint union of R1 -equivalence classes, say X = ∪Xi

• X is a disjoint union of R2 -equivalence classes, say X = ∪Yj .
• Show that, for all i, j, Xi ∩ Yj 6= ∅.