We examine the power of nondeterministic finite automata with acceptance of an input word defined by a leaf language, i.e., a condition on the sequence of leaves in the automaton's computation tree. We study leaf languages either taken from one of the classes of the Chomsky hierarchy, or taken from a time- or space-bounded complexity class. We contrast the obtained results with those known for leaf languages for Turing machines and Boolean circuits.
Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science