This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems, DCFS 2014, held in Turku, Finland, in August 2014. The 27 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 35 submissions. The conference dealt with the following topics: Automata, grammars, languages and other formal systems; various modes of operation and complexity measures; trade-offs between computational models and modes of operation; succinctness of description of objects, state explosion-like phenomena; circuit complexity of Boolean...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Descriptional Complexity of Formal Systems, DCFS 2015, held in Waterloo, ON, Canada, in June 2015. The 23 full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The subject of the workshop was descriptional complexity. Roughly speaking, this field is concerned with the size of objects in various mathematical models of computation, such as finite automata, pushdown automata, and Turing machines. Descriptional complexity serves as a theoretical...