Synchronization

Speaker: Peter Cameron (Queen Mary University of London)

Time: 4:00PM
Date: Mon 22nd November 2010

Location: Mathematical Sciences Seminar Room

Abstract
The topic of this talk began with attempts to prove the famous Cerny conjecture (made in the 1960s and still open) about synchronizing automata. The approach suggested to Araujo and Steinberg leads us first into permutation groups,
and a hierarchy of new conditions between primitivity and 2-transitivity, and then to graph homomorphisms. The approach has not yielded very much new information about the Cerny conjecture but has produced a lot of new ideas about other topics, some of which I will discuss.

(This talk is part of the Algebra/Claude Shannon Institute series.)