Abstract.Černý's conjecture is a longstanding open problem in automata theory. We study two different concepts, which allow to approach it from a new angle. The first one is the triple rendezvous time, i.e., the length of the shortest word mapping three states onto a single one. The second one is the synchronizing probability function of an automaton, a recently introduced tool which reinterprets the synchronizing phenomenon as a two-player game, and allows to obtain optimal strategies through a Linear Program.Our contribution is twofold. First, by coupling two different novel approaches based on the synchronizing probability function and properties of linear programming, we obtain a new upper bound on the triple rendezvous time. Second, by exhibiting a family of counterexamples, we disprove a conjecture on the growth of the synchronizing probability function. We then suggest natural followups towardsČerný's conjecture.
Automata, Logic and Semantics
International audience
We provide a counterexample to a lemma used in a recent tentative improvement of the Pin-Frankl bound for synchronizing automata. This example naturally leads us to formulate an open question, whose answer could fix the line of the proof, and improve the bound.
Motivated by the Babai conjecture and the Černý 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 [Formula: see text] states in this class, we prove that the reset threshold is upper-bounded by [Formula: see text] and can attain the value [Formula: see text]. In addition, we study diameters of the pair digraphs of permutation automata and construct [Formula: see text]-state permutation automata with diameter [Formula: see text].
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