English

Lengths of extremal square-free ternary words

Combinatorics 2020-02-03 v1 Discrete Mathematics Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

A square-free word ww over a fixed alphabet Σ\Sigma is extremal if every word obtained from ww by inserting a single letter from Σ\Sigma (at any position) contains a square. Grytczuk et al. recently introduced the concept of extremal square-free word, and demonstrated that there are arbitrarily long extremal square-free ternary words. We find all lengths which admit an extremal square-free ternary word. In particular, we show that there is an extremal square-free ternary word of every sufficiently large length. We also solve the analogous problem for circular words.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.11763,
  title  = {Lengths of extremal square-free ternary words},
  author = {Lucas Mol and Narad Rampersad},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.11763},
  year   = {2020}
}