Related papers: DFAs and PFAs with Long Shortest Synchronizing Wor…
Finite state automata (FSA) are ubiquitous in computer science. Two of the most important algorithms for FSA processing are the conversion of a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) to a deterministic finite automaton (DFA), and then the…
Co-lex partial orders were recently introduced in (Cotumaccio et al., SODA 2021 and JACM 2023) as a powerful tool to index finite state automata, with applications to regular expression matching. They generalize Wheeler orders (Gagie et…
We prove that, unless $\mathrm{P}=\mathrm{NP}$, no polynomial algorithm can approximate the minimum length of \sws for a given \san within a constant factor.
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 study the computational complexity of various problems related to synchronization of weakly acyclic automata, a subclass of widely studied aperiodic automata. We provide upper and lower bounds on the length of a shortest word…
We approach the task of computing a carefully synchronizing word of optimum length for a given partial deterministic automaton, encoding the problem as an instance of SAT and invoking a SAT solver. Our experiments demonstrate that this…
We examine the NFA minimization problem in terms of atomic NFA's, that is, NFA's in which the right language of every state is a union of atoms, where the atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and…
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…
Asynchronous automata are a model of distributed finite state processes synchronising on shared actions. A celebrated result by Zielonka shows how a deterministic asynchronous automaton (AA) can be synthesised, starting from two inputs: a…
In this paper we describe an approach to finding the shortest reset word of a finite synchronizing automaton by using a SAT solver. We use this approach to perform an experimental study of the length of the shortest reset word of a finite…
The communication matrix for two-way deterministic finite automata (2DFA) with $n$ states is defined for an automaton over a full alphabet of all $(2n+1)^n$ possible symbols: its rows and columns are indexed by strings, and the entry $(u,…
We present an infinite series of $n$-state Eulerian automata whose reset words have length at least $(n^2-3)/2$. This improves the current lower bound on the length of shortest reset words in Eulerian automata. We conjecture that…
Wheeler DFAs (WDFAs) are a sub-class of finite-state automata which is playing an important role in the emerging field of compressed data structures: as opposed to general automata, WDFAs can be stored in just $\log\sigma + O(1)$ bits per…
This paper establishes a lower bound on the number of states necessary in the worst case to simulate an $n$-state two-way nondeterministic finite automaton (2NFA) by a one-way unambiguous finite automaton (UFA). It is proved that for every…
In a recent article by Chapuy and Perarnau, it was shown that a uniformly chosen automaton on $n$ states with a $2$-letter alphabet has a synchronizing word of length $O(\sqrt{n}\log n)$ with high probability. In this note, we improve this…
This paper studies the complexity of operations on finite automata and the complexity of their decision problems when the alphabet is unary. Let $n$ denote the maximum of the number of states of the input finite automata considered in the…
Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, has been viewed as a manifestation of compression, i.e. the minimization of the length of forms -- a universal principle of natural communication.…
We investigate the state size of DFAs accepting the shuffle of two words. We provide words u and v, such that the minimal DFA for u shuffled with v requires an exponential number of states. We also show some conditions for the words u and v…
Synchronization strings are recently introduced by Haeupler and Shahrasbi (STOC 2017) in the study of codes for correcting insertion and deletion errors (insdel codes). They showed that for any parameter $\varepsilon>0$, synchronization…
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…