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In an automaton, we might have a state that once reached cannot be left.

It is for example for Ø in

Automaton from Wikipedia

Is there a common/official name for such a state ?

SylvainD
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3 Answers3

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In the notes we use at my institution, it's called a black hole.

Gerry Myerson
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Such a state is usually called a sink state or sometimes a dead state or a zero state. "Sink state" seems to be the most largely accepted terminology in the literature.

J.-E. Pin
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From Theory and Applications of Models of Computation. 9th Annual Conference:

A sink state in an S-automaton is a state whose all outgoing transitions loop into the state itself.

SylvainD
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