English

Synchronizing random automata through repeated 'a' inputs

Combinatorics 2023-07-26 v2 Formal Languages and Automata Theory Probability

Abstract

In a recent article by Chapuy and Perarnau, it was shown that a uniformly chosen automaton on nn states with a 22-letter alphabet has a synchronizing word of length O(nlogn)O(\sqrt{n}\log n) with high probability. In this note, we improve this result by showing that, for any ε>0\varepsilon>0, there exists a synchronizing word of length O(ε1nlogn)O(\varepsilon^{-1}\sqrt{n \log n}) with probability 1ε1-\varepsilon. Our proof is based on two properties of random automata. First, there are words ω\omega of length O(nlogn)O(\sqrt{n \log n}) such that the expected number of possible states for the automaton, after inputting ω\omega, is O(n/logn)O(\sqrt{n/\log n}). Second, with high probability, each pair of states can be synchronized by a word of length O(logn)O(\log n).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.09040,
  title  = {Synchronizing random automata through repeated 'a' inputs},
  author = {Anders Martinsson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.09040},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

10 pages, no figures. comments welcome

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:05:49.952Z