Words of Minimum Rank in Deterministic Finite Automata




Jarkko Kari, Andrew Ryzhikov, Anton Varonka

Hofman P., Skrzypczak M.

International Conference on Developments in Language Theory

2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Developments in Language Theory 23rd International Conference, DLT 2019, Warsaw, Poland, August 5–9, 2019, Proceedings

Theoretical Computer Science and General Issues

11647

74

87

978-3-030-24885-7

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24886-4_5

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/43959793



The rank of a word in a deterministic finite automaton is the size of the image of the whole state set under the mapping defined by this word. We study the length of shortest words of minimum rank in several classes of complete deterministic finite automata, namely, strongly connected and Eulerian automata. A conjecture bounding this length is known as the Rank Conjecture, a generalization of the well known Černý Conjecture. We prove upper bounds on the length of shortest words of minimum rank in automata from the mentioned classes, and provide several families of automata with long words of minimum rank. Some results in this direction are also obtained for automata with rank equal to period (the greatest common divisor of lengths of all cycles) and for circular automata.


Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 14:13