Related papers: The Discrepancy of the Lex-Least De Bruijn Sequenc…

We introduce two notions of discrepancy between binary vectors, which are not metric functions in general but nonetheless capture the mathematical structure of the binary asymmetric channel. In turn, these lead to two new fundamental…

Let $L_n$ be the length of the longest common subsequence of two independent i.i.d. sequences of Bernoulli variables of length $n$. We prove that the order of the standard deviation of $L_n$ is $\sqrt{n}$, provided the parameter of the…

Steinerberger introduced the Buffon discrepancy problem, asking how accurately a one-dimensional set of length $L$ in a convex body can match the Crofton-predicted line-intersection counts, and proved an $O\left(L^{1/3}\right)$ upper bound…

Communication over the binary erasure channel (BEC) using low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and belief propagation (BP) decoding is considered. The average bit error probability of an irregular LDPC code ensemble after a fixed number of…

Let $D$ be a set of positive integers. A $D$-diffsequence of length $k$ is a sequence of positive integers $a_1 < \cdots < a_k$ such that $a_{i+1}-a_i\in D$ for $i=1,\ldots,k-1$. For $D=\{2^i\mid i\in \mathbb{Z}_{\ge 0}\}$, it is known that…

According to Benford's law, the most significant digit in many datasets is not uniformly distributed, but obeys a well defined power law distribution with smaller digits appearing more often. Among one of the myriad particle physics…

Let $(X_i)_{i \geq 1}$ and $(Y_i)_{i\geq1}$ be two independent sequences of independent identically distributed random variables taking their values in a common finite alphabet and having the same law. Let $LC_n$ be the length of the…

Negative avoiding sequences of span $n$ are periodic sequences of elements from $\mathbb{Z}_k$ for some $k$ with the property that no $n$-tuple occurs more than once in a period and if an $n$-tuple does occur then its negative does not.…

Let $s(n)$ be the number of different remainders $n \bmod k$, where $1 \leq k \leq \lfloor n/2 \rfloor$. This rather natural sequence is sequence A283190 in the OEIS and while some basic facts are known, it seems that surprisingly it has…

Let $\widetilde{\alpha}$ be a length-$L$ cyclic sequence of characters from a size-$K$ alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ such that the number of occurrences of any length-$m$ string on $\mathcal{A}$ as a substring of $\widetilde{\alpha}$ is $\lfloor L…

A difference basis with respect to $n$ is a subset $A \subseteq \mathbb{Z}$ such that $A - A \supseteq \{1, \ldots, n\}$. R\'{e}dei and R\'{e}nyi showed that the minimum size of a difference basis with respect to $n$ is $(c+o(1))\sqrt{n}$…

A balanced generalized de Bruijn sequence with parameters $(n,l,k)$ is a cyclic sequence of $n$ bits such that (a) the number of 0's equals the number of 1's, and (b) each substring of length $l$ occurs at most $k$ times. We determine…

The comma sequence (1, 12, 35, 94, ...) is the lexicographically earliest sequence such that the difference of consecutive terms equals the concatenation of the digits on either side of the comma separating them. The behavior of a…

A square is a word of the form $xx$ for a non-empty word $x$. Brlek and Li [Comb. Theory, 2025] proved that the number of distinct squares in a word $w$ of length $n$ is at most $n - \sigma$, where $\sigma$ is the number of letters used in…

In a seminal paper of Charikar et al. on the smallest grammar problem, the authors derive upper and lower bounds on the approximation ratios for several grammar-based compressors, but in all cases there is a gap between the lower and upper…

A subset $B$ of a group $G$ is called a difference basis of $G$ if each element $g\in G$ can be written as the difference $g=ab^{-1}$ of some elements $a,b\in B$. The smallest cardinality $|B|$ of a difference basis $B\subset G$ is called…

Identification of latent binary sequences from a pool of noisy observations has a wide range of applications in both statistical learning and population genetics. Each observed sequence is the result of passing one of the latent…

Let $A$ be a finite or countable alphabet and let $\theta$ be literal (anti)morphism onto $A^*$ (by definition, such a correspondence is determinated by a permutation of the alphabet). This paper deals with sets which are invariant under…

The binary perceptron problem asks us to find a sign vector in the intersection of independently chosen random halfspaces with intercept $-\kappa$. We analyze the performance of the canonical discrepancy minimization algorithms of…

Let A be a finite or countable alphabet and let $\theta$ be a literal (anti-)automorphism onto A * (by definition, such a correspondence is determinated by a permutation of the alphabet). This paper deals with sets which are invariant under…