Decidability of involution hypercodes

Given a finite set X of strings, X is a hypercode if a string in X is not a subsequence of any other string in X. We consider hypercodes for involution codes, which are useful for DNA strand design, and define an involution hypercode. We then tackle the involution hypercode decidability problem; that is, to determine whether or not a given language is an involution hypercode. Based on the hypercode properties, we design a polynomial runtime algorithm for regular languages. We also prove that it is decidable whether or not a context-free language is an involution hypercode. Note that it is undecidable for some other involution codes such as involution prefix codes, suffix codes, and k-intercodes.

Authors

• Da-Jung Cho
• Yo-Sub Han
• Sang-Ki Ko

Keywords

• Involution hypercodes
• Decidability
• DNA codes
• Edit-distance