This paper investigates some fundamental properties of one-way alternating pushdown automata with sublinear space. We first show that one-way nondeterministic pushdown automata are incomparale with one-way alternating pushdown automata with only universal states, for spaces between log log n and log n, and also for spaces between log n and n/log n. We then show that there exists an infinite space hierarchy among one-way alternating pushdown automata with only universal states which have sublinear space.

This paper introduces a 1-inkdot two-way alternating pushdown automaton which is a two-way alternating pushdown automaton (2apda) with the additional power of marking at most 1 tape-cell on the input (with an inkdot) once. We first investigate a relationship between the accepting powers of sublogarithmically space-bounded 2apda's with and without 1 inkdot, and show, for example, that sublogarithmically space-bounded 2apda's with 1 inkdot are more powerful than those which have no inkdots. We next investigate an alternation hierarchy for sublogarithmically space-bounded 1-inkdot 2apda's, and show that the alternation hierarchy on the first level for 1-inkdot 2apda's holds, and we also show that 1-inkdot two-way nondeterministic pushdown automata using sublogarithmic space are incomparable with 1-inkdot two-way alternating pushdown automata with only universal states using the same space.

This paper first investigates a relationship between inkdot-depth and inkdot-size of inkdot two-way alternating Turing machines and pushdown automata with sublogarithmic space, and shows that there exists a language accepted by a strongly loglog n space-bounded alternating pushdown automaton with inkdot-depth 1, but not accepted by any weakly o (log n) space-bounded and d (n) inkdot-size bounded alternating Turing machine, for any function d (n) such that limn [d (n)log n/n1/2] = 0. In this paper, we also show that there exists an infinite space hierarchy among two-way alternating pushdown automata with sublogarithmic space.

This paper investigates the accepting powers of multi-inkdot two-way alternating pushdown automata (Turing machines) with sublogarithmic space and constant leaf-size. For each k1, and each m0, let weak-ASPACEm [L(n),k] denote the class of languages accepted by simultaneously weakly L(n) space-bounded and k leaf-bounded m-inkdot two-way alternating Turing machines, and let strong-2APDAm[L(n),k] denote the class of languages accepted by simultaneously strongly L(n) space-bounded and k leaf-bounded m-inkdot two-way alternating pushdown automata. We show that(1) strong-2APDAm [log log n,k+1]weak-ASPACEm[o(log n),k]φfor each k1 and each m1, and(2) strong-2APDA(m+1) [log log n,k]weak-ASPACEm[o(log n),k]φfor each k1 and each m0.

This paper investigates some fundamental properties of alternating one-way (or two-way) pushdown automata (pda's) with sublogarithmic space. We first show that strongly (weakly) sublogarithmic space-bounded two-way alternating pda's are more powerful than one-way alternating pda's with the same space-bound. Then, we show that weakly sublogarithmic space-bounded two-way (one-way) alternating pda's are more powerful than two-way (one-way) nondeterministic pda's and alternating pda's with only universal states using the same space, and we also show that weakly sublogarithmic space-bounded one-way nondeterministic Turing machines are incomparable with one-way alternating Turing machines with only universal states using the same space. Furthermore, we investigate several fundamental closure properties, and show that the class of languages accepted by weakly sublogarithmic space-bounded one-way alternating pda's and the class of languages accepted by sublogarithmic space-bounded two-way deterministic pda's (nondeterministic pda's, alternating pda's with only universal states) are not closed under concatenation, Kleene closure, and length preserving homomorphism. Finally, we briefly investigate a relationship between 'strongly' and 'weakly'.