Related papers: The Cerny conjecture and 1-contracting automata
It has been known since the 60's that any complete discrete $n$-state automaton admits a reset word of length not exceeding $\alpha n^3+o(n^3)$ for some absolute constant $\alpha$. J.-E. Pin and P. Frankl proved this statement with…
For general input automata, there exist regular constraint languages such that asking if a given input automaton admits a synchronizing word in the constraint language is PSPACE-complete or NP-complete. Here, we investigate this problem for…
The set of synchronizing words of a given $n$-state automaton forms a regular language recognizable by an automaton with $2^n - n$ states. The size of a recognizing automaton for the set of synchronizing words is linked to computational…
We use a semigroup-theoretic construction by Peter Higgins in order to produce, for each even $n$, an $n$-state and 3-letter synchronizing automaton with the following two features: 1) all its input letters act as idempotent selfmaps of…
Register automata (RAs) are finite automata extended with a finite set of registers to store and compare data from an infinite domain. We study the concept of synchronizing data words in RAs: does there exist a data word that sends all…
We develop a fully diagrammatic approach to finite-state automata, based on reinterpreting their usual state-transition graphical representation as a two-dimensional syntax of string diagrams. In this setting, we are able to provide a…
In this paper we prove that a uniformly distributed random circular automaton $\mathcal{A}_n$ of order $n$ synchronizes with high probability (whp). More precisely, we prove that $$ \mathbb{P}\left[\mathcal{A}_n \text{ synchronizes}\right]…
Consider $ A^* $, the free monoid generated by the finite alphabet $A$ with the concatenation operation. Two words have the same commutative image when one is a permutation of the symbols of the other. The commutative closure of a set $ L…
We consider the problem {\sc Max Sync Set} of finding a maximum synchronizing set of states in a given automaton. We show that the decision version of this problem is PSPACE-complete and investigate the approximability of {\sc Max Sync Set}…
An automaton is history-deterministic if its nondeterminism can be resolved on the fly, only using the prefix of the word read so far. This mild form of nondeterminism has attracted particular attention for its applications in synthesis…
This paper considers the existence of short synchronizing words in deterministic finite automata (DFAs). We define two general strategies for generating synchronizing words, and we show that each of these strategies can be applied if and…
It was conjectured by \v{C}ern\'y in 1964, that a synchronizing DFA on $n$ states always has a synchronizing word of length at most $(n-1)^2$, and he gave a sequence of DFAs for which this bound is reached. Until now a full analysis of all…
We develop a fully diagrammatic approach to the theory of finite-state automata, based on reinterpreting their usual state-transition graphical representation as a two-dimensional syntax of string diagrams. Moreover, we provide an…
For a finite state automaton, a synchronizing sequence is an input sequence that takes all the states to the same state. Checking the existence of a synchronizing sequence and finding a synchronizing sequence, if one exists, can be…
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. We characterize such automata in terms of graphs…
We present a strongly exponential lower bound that applies both to the subset synchronization threshold for binary deterministic automata and to the careful synchronization threshold for binary partial automata. In the later form, the…
Previously, self-verifying symmetric difference automata were defined and a tight bound of 2^n-1-1 was shown for state complexity in the unary case. We now consider the non-unary case and show that, for every n at least 2, there is a…
We present a new technique for demonstrating the reachability of states in deterministic finite automata representing the concatenation of two languages. Such demonstrations are a necessary step in establishing the state complexity of the…
We present several infinite series of synchronizing automata for which the minimum length of reset words is close to the square of the number of states. All these automata are tightly related to primitive digraphs with large exponent.
We consider the problem of determining the existence of a sequence of matrices driving a discrete-time consensus system to consensus. We transform this problem into one of the existence of a product of the transition (stochastic) matrices…