On the Final Coalgebra of Automatic Sequences

Streams are omnipresent in both mathematics and theoretical computer science. Automatic sequences form a particularly interesting class of streams that live in both worlds at the same time: they are defined in terms of finite automata, which are basic computational structures in computer science; and they appear in mathematics in many different ways, for instance in number theory. Examples of automatic sequences include the celebrated Thue-Morse sequence and the Rudin-Shapiro sequence. In this paper, we apply the coalgebraic perspective on streams to automatic sequences. We show that the set of automatic sequences carries a final coalgebra structure, consisting of the operations of head, even, and odd. This will allow us to show that automatic sequences are to (general) streams what rational languages are to (arbitrary) languages.