Deciding minimal distinguishing DFAs is NP-complete

Abstract: In this paper, we present a proof of the NP-completeness of computing the smallest Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) that distinguishes two given regular languages as DFAs. A distinguishing DFA is an automaton that recognizes a language which is a subset of exactly one of the given languages. We establish the NP-hardness of this decision problem by providing a reduction from the Boolean Satisfiability Problem (SAT) to deciding the existence of a distinguishing automaton of a specific size.