Experimental Study of the Shortest Reset Word of Random Automata

In this paper we describe an approach to finding the shortest reset word of a finite synchronizing automaton by using a SAT solver. We use this approach to perform an experimental study of the length of the shortest reset word of a finite synchronizing automaton. The largest automata we considered had 100 states. The results of the experiments allow us to formulate a hypothesis that the length of the shortest reset word of a random finite automaton with n states and 2 input letters with high probability is sublinear with respect to n and can be estimated as 1.95n0.55. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.We are grateful to Prof. M.V. Volkov for numerous productive discussions on the topic, and to the anonymous reviewers for their remarks which have helped us make the article more accurate and clear