Don's conjecture for binary completely reachable automata: an approach and its limitations

Abstract

A deterministic finite automaton in which every non-empty set of states occurs as the image of the whole state set under the action of a suitable input word is called completely reachable. It was conjectured that in each completely reachable automaton with $n$ states, every set of $k>0$ states is the image of a word of length at most $n(n-k)$. We confirm the conjecture for completely reachable automata with two input letters satisfying certain restrictions on the action of the letters.