English

Upper bound for the number of closed and privileged words

Discrete Mathematics 2020-01-22 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

A non-empty word ww is a border of the word uu if w<u\vert w\vert<\vert u\vert and ww is both a prefix and a suffix of uu. A word uu with the border ww is closed if uu has exactly two occurrences of ww. A word uu is privileged if u1\vert u\vert\leq 1 or if uu contains a privileged border ww that appears exactly twice in uu. Peltom\"aki (2016) presented the following open problem: "Give a nontrivial upper bound for B(n)B(n)", where B(n)B(n) denotes the number of privileged words of length nn. Let D(n)D(n) denote the number of closed words of length nn. Let q>1q>1 be the size of the alphabet. We show that there is a positive real constant cc such that D(n)clnnqnn\mbox,wheren>1\mbox.D(n)\leq c\ln{n}\frac{q^{n}}{\sqrt{n}}\mbox{, where }n>1\mbox{.} Privileged words are a subset of closed words, hence we show also an upper bound for the number of privileged words.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.11197,
  title  = {Upper bound for the number of closed and privileged words},
  author = {Josef Rukavicka},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.11197},
  year   = {2020}
}