English

Convergence of the number of period sets in strings

Discrete Mathematics 2023-05-09 v3 Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

Consider words of length nn. The set of all periods of a word of length nn is a subset of {0,1,2,,n1}\{0,1,2,\ldots,n-1\}. However, any subset of {0,1,2,,n1}\{0,1,2,\ldots,n-1\} is not necessarily a valid set of periods. In a seminal paper in 1981, Guibas and Odlyzko have proposed to encode the set of periods of a word into an nn long binary string, called an autocorrelation, where a one at position ii denotes the period ii. They considered the question of recognizing a valid period set, and also studied the number of valid period sets for length nn, denoted κn\kappa_n. They conjectured that ln(κn)\ln(\kappa_n) asymptotically converges to a constant times ln2(n)\ln^2(n). If improved lower bounds for ln(κn)/ln2(n)\ln(\kappa_n)/\ln^2(n) were proposed in 2001, the question of a tight upper bound has remained opened since Guibas and Odlyzko's paper. Here, we exhibit an upper bound for this fraction, which implies its convergence and closes this long standing conjecture. Moreover, we extend our result to find similar bounds for the number of correlations: a generalization of autocorrelations which encodes the overlaps between two strings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.08926,
  title  = {Convergence of the number of period sets in strings},
  author = {Eric Rivals and Michelle Sweering and Pengfei Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.08926},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

To appear on the proceedings of ICALP 2023 Version 3: 15 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, 21 bibliographic references; ICALP 2023 final version; updated related works and bibliographic references; updated Figure 1; typos corrected. version 2: 14 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables, 12 bibliographic references; version 2: added a Related works section with additional references