English

Rationality and computability of the covering radius for sofic shifts

Dynamical Systems 2026-03-24 v1 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

The covering radius of a shift space is a quantity of interest for information-theoretic applications of data transmission over noisy channels. We prove that the covering radius of a primitive sofic shift is a rational number, and describe an algorithm to compute the covering radius from a labeled graph presentation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.21449,
  title  = {Rationality and computability of the covering radius for sofic shifts},
  author = {Tom Meyerovitch and Aidan Young},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.21449},
  year   = {2026}
}