Tropical Semirings
Abstract
This article has been published in the proceedings of the "Idempotency" conference, organized by Jeremy Gunawardena in Bristol in october 1994. The aim of this paper is to present the tropical semirings and to survey a few problems relevant to them. Two apparently disconnected applications of the tropical semirings are presented: the Burnside type problems in group and semigroup theory and decidability problems in formal language theory.