The complexity of unary tiling recognizable picture languages: nondeterministic and unambiguous cases

In this paper we consider the classes REC1 and UREC1 of unary picture languages that are tiling recognizable and unambiguously tiling recognizable, respectively. By representing unary pictures by quasi-unary strings we characterize REC1 (resp. UREC1) as the class of quasi-unary languages recognized by nondeterministic (resp. unambiguous) linearly space-bounded one-tape Turing machines with constraint on the number of head reversals. We apply such a characterization in two directions. First we prove that the binary string languages encoding tiling recognizable unary square languages lies between NTIME (2(n)) and NTIME (4(n)); by separation results, this implies there exists a non-tiling recognizable unary square language whose binary representation is a language in NTIME (4(n) log n). In the other direction, by means of results on picture languages, we are able to compare the power of deterministic, unambiguous and nondeterministic one-tape Turing machines that are linearly space-bounded and have constraint on the number of head reversals.