Related papers: The \v{C}erny Conjecture for aperiodic automata
A deterministic finite automaton is directable if it has a directing word which takes the automaton from every state to the same state. These notions have been extended also to other kinds of automata. Thus, B.~Imreh and M.~Steinby (1999)…
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 introduce the category of dependency automata. A dependency automaton consists of two nondeterministic finite automata, with a relation between their states satisfying conditions. This category is equivalent to deterministic finite…
We exhibit new conditions under which a primitive automaton is synchronizing. In particular, we show that the primitivity of an automaton forces its synchronizability whenever the automaton has either a letter of defect 1 or a word of rank…
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…
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…
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…
A $d$-limited automaton is a Turing machine that may rewrite each input cell at most~$d$ times. Hibbard (1967) showed that for every $d \geq 2$ such automata recognize all context-free languages and that deterministic $d$-limited automata…
In [1], we introduced the weakly synchronizing languages for probabilistic automata. In this report, we show that the emptiness problem of weakly synchronizing languages for probabilistic automata is undecidable. This implies that the…
The state complexity of a Deterministic Finite-state automaton (DFA) is the number of states in its minimal equivalent DFA. We study the state complexity of random $n$-state DFAs over a $k$-symbol alphabet, drawn uniformly from the set…
Decidability of the determinization problem for weighted automata over the semiring $(\mathbb{Z} \cup {-\infty}, \max, +)$, WA for short, is a long-standing open question. We propose two ways of approaching it by constraining the search…
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…
The $n$th term of an automatic sequence is the output of a deterministic finite automaton fed with the representation of $n$ in a suitable numeration system. In this paper, instead of considering automatic sequences built on a numeration…
A closed word (a.k.a. periodic-like word or complete first return) is a word whose longest border does not have internal occurrences, or, equivalently, whose longest repeated prefix is not right special. We investigate the structure of…
Motivated by the Babai conjecture and the Cerny conjecture, we study the reset thresholds of automata with the transition monoid equal to the full monoid of transformations of the state set. For automata with $n$ states in this class, we…
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…
Analogous to regular string and tree languages, regular languages of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are defined in the literature. Although called regular, those DAG-languages are more powerful and, consequently, standard problems have a…
By fundamental results of Sch\"utzenberger, McNaughton and Papert from the 1970s, the classes of first-order definable and aperiodic languages coincide. Here, we extend this equivalence to a quantitative setting. For this, weighted automata…
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,…