Semisimple Synchronizing Automata and the Wedderburn-Artin Theory

We present a ring theoretic approach to Černý's conjecture via the Wedderburn-Artin theory. We first introduce the radical ideal of a synchronizing automaton, and then the natural notion of semisimple synchronizing automata. This is a rather broad class since it contains simple synchronizing automata like those in Černý's series. Semisimplicity gives also the advantage of “factorizing” the problem of finding a synchronizing word into the sub-problems of finding “short” words that are zeros into the projection of the simple components in the Wedderburn-Artin decomposition. In the general case this last problem is related to the search of radical words of length at most ${(n-1)}^2$ where n is the number of states of the automaton. We show that the solution of this “Radical Conjecture” would give an upper bound $2{(n-1)}^2$ for the shortest reset word in a strongly connected synchronizing automaton. Finally, we use this approach to prove the Radical Conjecture in some particular cases and Černý's conjecture for the class of strongly semisimple synchronizing automata. These are automata whose sets of synchronizing words are cyclic ideals, or equivalently, ideal regular languages that are closed under taking roots.