Related papers: The \v{C}erny conjecture
We study synchronizing automata with the shortest reset words of relatively large length. First, we refine the Frankl-Pin result on the length of the shortest words of rank $m$, and the B\'eal, Berlinkov, Perrin, and Steinberg results on…
A classic conjecture of F\"{u}redi, Kahn and Seymour (1993) states that given any hypergraph with non-negative edge weights $w(e)$, there exists a matching $M$ such that $\sum_{e \in M} (|e|-1+1/|e|)\, w(e) \geq w^*$, where $w^*$ is the…
The well known open \v{C}ern\'y conjecture states that each \san with $n$ states has a \sw of length at most $(n-1)^2$. On the other hand, the best known upper bound is cubic of $n$. Recently, in the paper \cite{CARPI1} of Alessandro and…
A synchronizing word of a deterministic automaton is a word in the alphabet of colors of its edges that maps the automaton to a single state. A coloring of edges of a directed graph is synchronizing if the coloring turns the graph into a…
Given a hypergraph $H$ and a weight function $w: V \rightarrow \{1, \dots, M\}$ on its vertices, we say that $w$ is isolating if there is exactly one edge of minimum weight $w(e) = \sum_{i \in e} w(i)$. The Isolation Lemma is a…
In a recent work, Keusch proved the so-called 1-2-3 Conjecture, raised by Karo\'nski, {\L}uczak, and Thomason in 2004: for every connected graph different from $K_2$, we can assign labels~$1,2,3$ to the edges so that no two adjacent…
Imagine an assembly line where a box with a lid and liquid in it enters in some unknown orientation. The box should leave the line with the open lid facing upwards with the liquid still in it. To save costs there are no complex sensors or…
Indexing strings via prefix (or suffix) sorting is, arguably, one of the most successful algorithmic techniques developed in the last decades. Can indexing be extended to languages? The main contribution of this paper is to initiate the…
Consider words of length $n$. The set of all periods of a word of length $n$ is a subset of $\{0,1,2,\ldots,n-1\}$. However, any subset of $\{0,1,2,\ldots,n-1\}$ is not necessarily a valid set of periods. In a seminal paper in 1981, Guibas…
The 1-2-3 Conjecture, posed in 2004 by Karonski, Luczak, and Thomason, is as follows: "If G is a graph with no connected component having exactly 2 vertices, then the edges of G may be assigned weights from the set {1,2,3} so that, for any…
Given a finite directed graph, a coloring of its edges turns the graph into a finite-state automaton. A k-synchronizing word of a deterministic automaton is a word in the alphabet of colors at its edges that maps the state set of the…
A deterministic finite automaton (DFA) separates two strings $w$ and $x$ if it accepts $w$ and rejects $x$. The minimum number of states required for a DFA to separate $w$ and $x$ is denoted by $sep(w,x)$. The present paper shows that the…
A drawing of a graph in the plane is called a thrackle if every pair of edges meets precisely once, either at a common vertex or at a proper crossing. Let t(n) denote the maximum number of edges that a thrackle of n vertices can have.…
Wheeler automata were introduced in 2017 as a tool to generalize existing indexing and compression techniques based on the Burrows-Wheeler transform. Intuitively, an automaton is said to be Wheeler if there exists a total order on its…
Given a regular language L over an ordered alphabet $\Sigma$, the set of lexicographically smallest (resp., largest) words of each length is itself regular. Moreover, there exists an unambiguous finite-state transducer that, on a given word…
The work presents some new algorithms realized recently in the package TESTAS. They decide whether or not deterministic finite automaton (DFA) is synchronizing, several procedures find relatively short synchronizing words and a…
The Wiener index of a connected graph is defined as the sum of distances between all its unordered pairs of vertices. Characterising graphs on $n$ vertices with a fixed diameter that maximise the Wiener index is a long-standing open…
We show that a special case of the Feferman-Vaught composition theorem gives rise to a natural notion of automata for finite words over an infinite alphabet, with good closure and decidability properties, as well as several logical…
For an arbitrary word $w$ on an alphabet, we can define the alternating symbol graph, $G(w)$, as the graph in which the edge $(a, b)$ is in $E$ iff the letters $a$ and $b$ alternate in the word $w$. A graph $G = (V, E)$ is said to be…
We introduce, and partially resolve, a conjecture that brings a three-centuries-old derangements phenomenon and its much younger two-decades-old analogue under the same umbrella. Through a graph-theoretic lens, a derangement is a perfect…