English

On some interesting ternary formulas

Discrete Mathematics 2018-09-26 v2

Abstract

We obtain the following results about the avoidance of ternary formulas. Up to renaming of the letters, the only infinite ternary words avoiding the formula ABCAB.ABCBA.ACB.BACABCAB.ABCBA.ACB.BAC (resp. ABCA.BCAB.BCB.CBAABCA.BCAB.BCB.CBA) have the same set of recurrent factors as the fixed point of 0012\texttt{0}\mapsto\texttt{012}, 102\texttt{1}\mapsto\texttt{02}, 21\texttt{2}\mapsto\texttt{1}. The formula ABAC.BACA.ABCAABAC.BACA.ABCA is avoided by polynomially many binary words and there exist arbitrarily many infinite binary words with different sets of recurrent factors that avoid it. If every variable of a ternary formula appears at least twice in the same fragment, then the formula is 33-avoidable. The pattern ABACADABCAABACADABCA is unavoidable for the class of C4C_4-minor-free graphs with maximum degree~33. This disproves a conjecture of Grytczuk. The formula ABCA.ACBAABCA.ACBA, or equivalently the palindromic pattern ABCADACBAABCADACBA, has avoidability index 44.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.03233,
  title  = {On some interesting ternary formulas},
  author = {Pascal Ochem and Matthieu Rosenfeld},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03233},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Version 1 was accepted to WORDS 2017. Version 2 contains new results in section 4 (about nice formulas) and section 6 (about palindromic patterns)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:14:55.783Z