The goal of our research is the development of algorithmic tools for the analysis of chemical reaction networks proposed as models of biological homochirality. We focus on two algorithmic problems: detecting whether or not a chemical mechanism admits mirror symmetry-breaking; and, given one of those networks as input, sampling the set of racemic steady states that can produce mirror symmetry-breaking. Algorithmic solutions to those two problems will allow us to compute the parameter values for the emergence of homochirality. We found a mathematical criterion for the occurrence of mirror symmetry-breaking. This criterion allows us to compute semialgebraic definitions of the sets of racemic steady states that produce homochirality. Although those semialgebraic definitions can be processed algorithmically, the algorithmic analysis of them becomes unfeasible in most cases, given the nonlinear character of those definitions. We use Clarke’s system of convex coordinates to linearize, as much as possible, those semialgebraic definitions. As a result of this work, we get an efficient algorithm that solves both algorithmic problems for networks containing only one enantiomeric pair and a heuristic algorithm that can be used in the general case, with two or more enantiomeric pairs.

It is one of the most famous open problems to determine the minimum amount of states required by a deterministic finite automaton to distinguish a pair of strings, which was stated by Christian Choffrut more than thirty years ago. We investigate the same question for different automata models and we obtain new upper and lower bounds for some of them including alternating, ultrametric, quantum, and affine finite automata.

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Abstract. Determining the minimum number of states required by a deterministic finite automaton to separate a given pair of different words (to accept one word and to reject the other) is an important challenge. In this paper, we ask the same question for quantum finite automata (QFAs). We classify such pairs as easy and hard ones. We show that 2-state QFAs with real amplitudes can separate any easy pair with zero-error but cannot separate some hard pairs even in nondeterministic acceptance mode. When using complex amplitudes, 2-state QFAs can separate any pair in nondeterministic acceptance mode, and here we conjecture that they can separate any pair also with zero-error. Then, we focus on (a more general problem) separating a pair of two disjoint finite set of words. We show that QFAs can separate them efficiently in nondeterministic acceptance mode, i.e., the number of states is two to the power of the size of the small set.

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