Semiautomatic Structures

Abstract

Semiautomatic structures generalise automatic structures in the sense that for some of the relations and functions in the structure one only requires the derived relations and structures are automatic when all but one input are filled with constants. One can also permit that this applies to equality in the structure so that only the sets of representatives equal to a given element of the structure are regular while equality itself is not an automatic relation on the domain of representatives. It is shown that one can find semiautomatic representations for the field of rationals and also for finite algebraic field extensions of it. Furthermore, one can show that infinite algebraic extensions of finite fields have semiautomatic representations in which the addition and equality are both automatic. Further prominent examples of semiautomatic structures are term algebras, any relational structure over a countable domain with a countable signature and any permutation algebra with a countable domain. Furthermore, examples of structures which fail to be semiautomatic are provided.