English

Synchronizing weighted automata

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2014-05-23 v3

Abstract

We introduce two generalizations of synchronizability to automata with transitions weighted in an arbitrary semiring K=(K,+,*,0,1). (or equivalently, to finite sets of matrices in K^nxn.) Let us call a matrix A location-synchronizing if there exists a column in A consisting of nonzero entries such that all the other columns of A are filled by zeros. If additionally all the entries of this designated column are the same, we call A synchronizing. Note that these notions coincide for stochastic matrices and also in the Boolean semiring. A set M of matrices in K^nxn is called (location-)synchronizing if M generates a matrix subsemigroup containing a (location-)synchronizing matrix. The K-(location-)synchronizability problem is the following: given a finite set M of nxn matrices with entries in K, is it (location-)synchronizing? Both problems are PSPACE-hard for any nontrivial semiring. We give sufficient conditions for the semiring K when the problems are PSPACE-complete and show several undecidability results as well, e.g. synchronizability is undecidable if 1 has infinite order in (K,+,0) or when the free semigroup on two generators can be embedded into (K,*,1).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1403.5729,
  title  = {Synchronizing weighted automata},
  author = {Szabolcs Iván},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.5729},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.5272

R2 v1 2026-06-22T03:32:17.879Z