Authors: Pascal Caron ; Edwin Hamel-De le court ; Jean-Gabriel Luque ; Bruno Patrou

A monster is an automaton in which every function from states to states is represented by at least one letter. A modifier is a set of functions allowing one to transform a set of automata into one automaton. We revisit some language transformation algorithms in terms of modifier and monster. These new theoretical concepts allow one to find easily some state complexities. We illustrate this by retrieving the state complexity of the Star of Intersection and the one of the Square root operation.