English

Avoiding squares over words with lists of size three amongst four symbols

Combinatorics 2021-05-12 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

In 2007, Grytczuk conjecture that for any sequence (i)i1(\ell_i)_{i\ge1} of alphabets of size 33 there exists a square-free infinite word ww such that for all ii, the ii-th letter of ww belongs to i\ell_i. The result of Thue of 1906 implies that there is an infinite square-free word if all the i\ell_i are identical. On the other, hand Grytczuk, Przyby{\l}o and Zhu showed in 2011 that it also holds if the i\ell_i are of size 44 instead of 33. In this article, we first show that if the lists are of size 44, the number of square-free words is at least 2.45n2.45^n (the previous similar bound was 2n2^n). We then show our main result: we can construct such a square-free word if the lists are subsets of size 33 of the same alphabet of size 44. Our proof also implies that there are at least 1.25n1.25^n square-free words of length nn for any such list assignment. This proof relies on the existence of a set of coefficients verified with a computer. We suspect that the full conjecture could be resolved by this method with a much more powerful computer (but we might need to wait a few decades for such a computer to be available).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2104.09965,
  title  = {Avoiding squares over words with lists of size three amongst four symbols},
  author = {Matthieu Rosenfeld},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.09965},
  year   = {2021}
}