English

Density dichotomy in random words

Combinatorics 2016-10-18 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Word WW is said to encounter word VV provided there is a homomorphism ϕ\phi mapping letters to nonempty words so that ϕ(V)\phi(V) is a substring of WW. For example, taking ϕ\phi such that ϕ(h)=c\phi(h)=c and ϕ(u)=ien\phi(u)=ien, we see that "science" encounters "huh" since cienc=ϕ(huh)cienc=\phi(huh). The density of VV in WW, δ(V,W)\delta(V,W), is the proportion of substrings of WW that are homomorphic images of VV. So the density of "huh" in "science" is 2/(82)2/{8 \choose 2}. A word is doubled if every letter that appears in the word appears at least twice. The dichotomy: Let VV be a word over any alphabet, Σ\Sigma a finite alphabet with at least 2 letters, and WnΣnW_n \in \Sigma^n chosen uniformly at random. Word VV is doubled if and only if E(δ(V,Wn))0\mathbb{E}(\delta(V,W_n)) \rightarrow 0 as nn \rightarrow \infty. We further explore convergence for nondoubled words and concentration of the limit distribution for doubled words around its mean.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.04424,
  title  = {Density dichotomy in random words},
  author = {Joshua Cooper and Danny Rorabaugh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.04424},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

12 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:17:42.286Z