English

An alternating colouring function on strings

Combinatorics 2024-11-04 v1 Dynamical Systems

Abstract

An alternating colouring function is defined on strings over the alphabet {0,1}\{0, 1\}. It divides the strings in colourable and non-colourable ones. The points in the subshift of finite type defined by forbidding all non-colourable strings of a certain length alternate between states of one colour and states of the other colour. In other words, the points in the 2nd power shifts all have the same colour. The number KnK_n of non-colourable strings of length n2n \ge 2 is shown to be 2(Jn2+1)2 \cdot (J_{n-2} + 1) where JJ is the sequence of Jacobsthal numbers. The number of sources and sinks in the de Bruijn graph of dimension n3n \ge 3 with non-colourable edges removed is shown each to be Kn4K_n - 4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.00562,
  title  = {An alternating colouring function on strings},
  author = {Jonathan Garbe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.00562},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

45 pages, 13 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:44:12.874Z