Related papers: DFAs and PFAs with Long Shortest Synchronizing Wor…
We investigate the magic number problem, that is, the question whether there exists a minimal n-state nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) whose equivalent minimal deterministic finite automaton (DFA) has alpha states, for all n and…
A pattern is encountered in a word if some infix of the word is the image of the pattern under some non-erasing morphism. A pattern $p$ is unavoidable if, over every finite alphabet, every sufficiently long word encounters $p$. A theorem by…
Given a nondeterministic finite-state automaton (NFA), we aim to estimate the size of an equivalent deterministic finite-state automaton (DFA). We demonstrate that computing the state complexity of an NFA within polynomial precision is…
Families of DFAs (FDFAs) provide an alternative formalism for recognizing $\omega$-regular languages. The motivation for introducing them was a desired correlation between the automaton states and right congruence relations, in a manner…
We present a report from a series of experiments involving computation of the shortest reset words for automata with small number of states. We confirm that the \v{C}ern\'{y} conjecture is true for all automata with at most 11 states on 2…
Let $A(n,d)$ be the maximum number of $0,1$ words of length $n$, any two having Hamming distance at least $d$. We prove $A(20,8)=256$, which implies that the quadruply shortened Golay code is optimal. Moreover, we show $A(18,6)\leq 673$,…
We examine the open problem of finding the shortest string that contains each of the n! permutations of n symbols as contiguous substrings (i.e., the shortest superpermutation on n symbols). It has been conjectured that the shortest…
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…
In this paper, we determine the maximum number of distinct Lyndon factors that a word of length $n$ can contain. We also derive formulas for the expected total number of Lyndon factors in a word of length $n$ on an alphabet of size…
In the constrained synchronization problem we ask if a given automaton admits a synchronizing word coming from a fixed regular constraint language. We show that intersecting a given constraint language with an ideal language decreases the…
Learning finite automata from positive examples has recently gained attention as a powerful approach for understanding, explaining, analyzing, and verifying black-box systems. The motivation for focusing solely on positive examples arises…
In the past thirty years, numerous algorithms for building the suffix array of a string have been proposed. In 2021, the notion of suffix array was extended from strings to DFAs, and it was shown that the resulting data structure can be…
Following (Kolpakov et al., 2013; Gawrychowski and Manea, 2015), we continue the study of {\em $\alpha$-gapped repeats} in strings, defined as factors $uvu$ with $|uv|\leq \alpha |u|$. Our main result is the $O(\alpha n)$ bound on the…
A Wheeler automaton is a finite state automaton whose states admit a total Wheeler order, reflecting the co-lexicographic order of the strings labeling source-to-node paths. A Wheeler language is a regular language admitting an accepting…
The asynchronous automaton associated with a Boolean network $f:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}^n$ is considered in many applications. It is the finite deterministic automaton with set of states $\{0,1\}^n$, alphabet $\{1,\dots,n\}$, where the action…
In this paper we examine decision problems associated with various classes of convex languages, studied by Ang and Brzozowski (under the name "continuous languages"). We show that we can decide whether a given language L is prefix-,…
The number of frequencies of factors of length $n+1$ in a recurrent aperiodic infinite word does not exceed $3\Delta \C(n)$, where $\Delta \C (n)$ is the first difference of factor complexity, as shown by Boshernitzan. Pelantov\'a together…
Considering a short frame length, which is typical in Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency and massive Machine Type Communications, a trade-off exists between improving the performance of frame synchronization (FS) and improving the performance of…
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…
We show that a well-known family of deterministic finite automata can be used to distinguish distinct binary strings of the same length from every start state. Further, we establish almost matching lower and upper bounds on the number of…