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Generalized Star Height at Most Four

OpenAI · September 25, 2026

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Abstract

Every regular language over a finite alphabet has generalized star height at most four over that same alphabet. We give a complete construction using an affine correction that hides one interval product, a finite clock, and several scales for moving boundaries through periodic words.

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Notes

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work in progress

Collected automatically by AI tools (Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra, 2026-10-21) and not checked by a person. May be wrong or incomplete. Report an error.

Follow-up works

Formalization

Possibly relevant literature (found by the agent, not checked)

  • Jean-Éric Pin, Open problems about regular languages, 35 years later (talk slides, Brzozowski 80, 2015-06-24). Slides 9–10 note that no language of generalized star height greater than one was known and recall that if the height-at-most-one languages form a variety then all regular languages have height at most one; this bears on the paper's discussion of inverse-morphism closure and of whether height one suffices.

Digests and expositions

Elsewhere

Independent sites; their content is not reviewed here.

Cite

@misc{OAI:Generalized-Star-Height-at-Most-Four-September-25-2026,
  author = {{OpenAI}},
  title = {{Generalized Star Height at Most Four}},
  howpublished = {OpenAI Math Release preprint
                  \href{https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/preprints/Generalized-Star-Height-at-Most-Four-September-25-2026/Generalized-Star-Height-at-Most-Four-September-25-2026.pdf}{OAI:Generalized-Star-Height-at-Most-Four-September-25-2026}},
  year = {2026}
}

Lean formalization

OpenAI provides Lean files for this family: lean/docs/134.md. The Lean statements have not been checked by people against the paper's claims.

Family 134: Generalized star height at most three

Every regular language over a finite alphabet has a generalized regular expression with at most three nested Kleene stars, allowing union, concatenation and complement over the same alphabet. This establishes an absolute bound independent of automaton size, resolving the uniform-boundedness version of the generalized star-height problem.

Other papers in this family: