A Solution to Yamakami's Problem on Advised Context-free Languages

Abstract: Yamakami [2011, Theoret. Comput. Sci.] studies context-free languages with advice functions. Here, the length of an advice is assumed to be the same as that of an input. Let CFL and CFL/n denote the class of all context-free languages and that with advice functions, respectively. We let CFL(2) denote the class of intersections of two context-free languages. An interesting direction of a research is asking how complex CFL(2) is, relative to CFL. Yamakami raised a problem whether there is a CFL-immune set in CFL(2) - CFL/n. The best known so far is that LSPACE - CFL/n has a CFL-immune set, where LSPACE denotes the class of languages recognized in logarithmic-space. We present an affirmative solution to his problem. Two key concepts of our proof are the nested palindrome and Yamakami's swapping lemma. The swapping lemma is applicable to the setting where the pumping lemma (Bar-Hillel's lemma) does not work. Our proof is an example showing how useful the swapping lemma is.