English

Prefix palindromic length of the Thue-Morse word

Discrete Mathematics 2020-01-09 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

The prefix palindromic length PPLu(n)PPL_u(n) of an infinite word uu is the minimal number of concatenated palindromes needed to express the prefix of length nn of uu. In a 2013 paper with Puzynina and Zamboni we stated the conjecture that PPLu(n)PPL_u(n) is unbounded for every infinite word uu which is not ultimately periodic. Up to now, the conjecture has been proven for almost all words, including all words avoiding some power pp. However, even in that simple case the existing upper bound for the minimal number nn such that PPLu(n)>KPPL_u(n)>K is greater than any constant to the power KK. Precise values of PPLu(n)PPL_u(n) are not known even for simplest examples like the Fibonacci word. In this paper, we give the first example of such a precise computation and compute the function of the prefix palindromic length of the Thue-Morse word, a famous test object for all functions on infinite words. It happens that this sequence is 22-regular, which raises the question if this fact can be generalized to all automatic sequences.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.09392,
  title  = {Prefix palindromic length of the Thue-Morse word},
  author = {Anna E. Frid},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.09392},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

The results of the paper have been announced, but not proven in detail, in my submission to DLT 2019. https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL22/Frid/frid4.html