Related papers: The Cerny Conjecture
We improve the best known upper bound on the length of the shortest reset words of synchronizing automata. The new bound is slightly better than $114 n^3 / 685 + O(n^2)$. The \v{C}ern\'y conjecture states that $(n-1)^2$ is an upper bound.…
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.…
We present a few classes of synchronizing automata exhibiting certain extremal properties with regard to synchronization. The first is a series of automata with subsets whose shortest extending words are of length $\varTheta(n^2)$, where…
Motivated by the \v{C}ern\'y conjecture for automata, we introduce the concept of monoidal automata, which allows the formulation of the \v{C}ern\'y conjecture for monoids. We show upper bounds on the reset threshold of monoids with certain…
A word $w$ of letters on edges of underlying graph $\Gamma$ of deterministic finite automaton (DFA) is called synchronizing if $w$ sends all states of the automaton to a unique state. J. \v{C}erny discovered in 1964 a sequence of $n$-state…
We refine a uniform algebraic approach for deriving upper bounds on reset thresholds of synchronizing automata. We express the condition that an automaton is synchronizing in terms of linear algebra, and obtain upper bounds for the reset…
Let the root of the word $w$ be the smallest prefix $v$ of $w$ such that $w$ is a prefix of $vvv...$. $per(w)$ is the length of the root of $w$. For any $n\ge5$, an $n$-ary threshold word is a word $w$ such that for any factor (subword) $v$…
In this paper, we show that every D3-directing CNFA can be mapped uniquely to a DFA with the same synchronizing word length. This implies that \v{C}ern\'y's conjecture generalizes to CNFAs and that the general upper bound for the length of…
A word $w$ is called a reaching word of a subset $S$ of states in a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) if $S$ is the image of $Q$ under the action of $w$. A DFA is called completely reachable if every non-empty subset of the state set has…
We give a short proof that Strassen's asymptotic rank conjecture implies that for every $\varepsilon > 0$ there exists a $(3/2^{2/3} + \varepsilon)^n$-time algorithm for set cover on a universe of size $n$ with sets of bounded size. This…
Strassen's asymptotic rank conjecture [Progr. Math. 120 (1994)] claims a strong submultiplicative upper bound on the rank of a three-tensor obtained as an iterated Kronecker product of a constant-size base tensor. The conjecture, if true,…
We give a new characterization of maximal repetitions (or runs) in strings based on Lyndon words. The characterization leads to a proof of what was known as the "runs" conjecture (Kolpakov \& Kucherov (FOCS '99)), which states that the…
Instead of looking at the lengths of synchronizing words as in \v{C}ern\'y's conjecture, we look at the switch count of such words, that is, we only count the switches from one letter to another. Where the synchronizing words of the…
An automaton is synchronizing if there is a word that maps all states onto the same state. \v{C}ern\'{y}'s conjecture on the length of the shortest such word is probably the most famous open problem in automata theory. We consider the…
A deterministic finite automaton in which every non-empty set of states occurs as the image of the whole state set under the action of a suitable input word is called completely reachable. It was conjectured that in each completely…
Let H be a 3-uniform hypergraph of order n with clique number k such that the intersection of all maximum cliques of H is empty. For fixed m=n-k, Szemer\'edi and Petruska conjectured the sharp bound $n\leq {m+2\choose 2}$. In this note the…
This paper addresses the lifting problem for the \v{C}ern\'y conjecture: namely, whether the validity of the conjecture for a quotient automaton can always be transferred (or "lifted") to the original automaton. Although a complete solution…
A graph is said to be diameter-$k$-critical if its diameter is $k$ and removal of any of its edges increases its diameter. A beautiful conjecture by Murty and Simon, says that every diameter-2-critical graph of order $n$ has at most…
We study the problem of synchronization of automata with random inputs. We present a series of automata such that the expected number of steps until synchronization is exponential in the number of states. At the same time, we show that the…
Recently, Gilmer proved the first constant lower bound for the union-closed sets conjecture via an information-theoretic argument. The heart of the argument is an entropic inequality involving the OR function of two i.i.d.\ binary vectors,…