Related papers: Don's conjecture for binary completely reachable a…
We construct a probabilistic finite automaton (PFA) with 7 states and an input alphabet of 5 symbols for which the PFA Emptiness Problem is undecidable. The only input for the decision problem is the starting distribution. For the proof, we…
We devise an algorithm which, given a bounded automaton A, decides whether the group generated by A is finite. The solution comes from a description of the infinite sequences having an infinite A-orbit using a deterministic finite-state…
A set X of partial words over a finite alphabet A is called unavoidable if every two-sided infinite word over A has a factor compatible with an element of X. Unlike the case of a set of words without holes, the problem of deciding whether…
We introduce the notion of expandability in the context of automaton semigroups and groups: a word is k-expandable if one can append a suffix to it such that the size of the orbit under the action of the automaton increases by at least k.…
It is shown that, for every $n \geqslant 2$, the maximum length of the shortest string accepted by an $n$-state direction-determinate two-way finite automaton is exactly $\binom{n}{\lfloor\frac{n}{2}\rfloor}-1$ (direction-determinate…
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…
An infinite word is S-automatic if, for all n>=0, its (n + 1)st letter is the output of a deterministic automaton fed with the representation of n in the considered numeration system S. In this extended abstract, we consider an analogous…
Accessible groups for which the language of all words defining the identity is accepted by a certain class of nested stack automata are virtually free.
In the classic problem of sequence prediction, a predictor receives a sequence of values from an emitter and tries to guess the next value before it appears. The predictor masters the emitter if there is a point after which all of the…
An automaton is unambiguous if for every input it has at most one accepting computation. An automaton is k-ambiguous (for k > 0) if for every input it has at most k accepting computations. An automaton is boundedly ambiguous if it is…
History-deterministic automata are those in which nondeterministic choices can be correctly resolved stepwise: there is a strategy to select a continuation of a run given the next input letter so that if the overall input word admits some…
A synchronizing word for an automaton is a word that brings that automaton into one and the same state, regardless of the starting position. Cerny conjectured in 1964 that if a n-state deterministic automaton has a synchronizing word, then…
We introduce a measure called width, quantifying the amount of nondeterminism in automata. Width generalises the notion of good-for-games (GFG) automata, that correspond to NFAs of width 1, and where an accepting run can be built on-the-fly…
We say that a set is exhaustible if it admits algorithmic universal quantification for continuous predicates in finite time, and searchable if there is an algorithm that, given any continuous predicate, either selects an element for which…
A condition characterizing the class of regular languages which have several nonisomorphic minimal reversible automata is presented. The condition concerns the structure of the minimum automaton accepting the language under consideration.…
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…
This paper introduces two mechanisms for computing over-approximations of sets of reachable states, with the aim of ensuring termination of state-space exploration. The first mechanism consists in over-approximating the automata…
This papers presents a general framework for the uniform random generation of deterministic real-time accessible pushdown automata. A polynomial time algorithm to randomly generate a pushdown automaton having a fixed stack operations total…
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…
Deterministic and nondeterministic finite automata with translucent letters were introduced by Nagy and Otto more than a decade ago as Cooperative Distributed systems of a kind of stateless restarting automata with window size one. These…