Related papers: Smooth infinite words over $n$-letter alphabets ha…
Smooth words over an alphabet of non-negative integers $\{a,b\}$ are infinite words that are infinitely derivable, the most famous example being the Oldenburger-Kolakoski word over $\{1,2\}$. The main way to study their language is to…
Our goal in this article is to review the known properties of the mysterious Kolakoski sequence and at the same time look at generalizations of it over arbitrary two letter alphabets. Our primary focus will here be the case where one of the…
A word $\sigma=\sigma_1...\sigma_n$ over the alphabet $[k]=\{1,2,...,k\}$ is said to be {\em smooth} if there are no two adjacent letters with difference greater than 1. A word $\sigma$ is said to be {\em smooth cyclic} if it is a smooth…
Carpi (1993) and Lepisto (1994) proved independently that smooth words are cube-free for the alphabet {1, 2}, but nothing is known on whether for the other 2-letter alphabets, smooth words are k-power-free for some suitable positive integer…
The Oldenburger-Kolakoski sequence is the only infinite sequence over the alphabet $\{1,2\}$ that starts with $1$ and is its own run-length encoding. In the present work, we take a step back from this largely known and studied sequence by…
Let $\gamma_{a,b}(n)$ be the number of smooth words of length $n$ over the alphabet $\{a,b\}$ with $a<b$. Say that a smooth word $w$ is \emph{left fully extendable} (LFE) if both $aw$ and $bw$ are smooth. In this paper, we prove that for…
The number of frequencies of factors of length $n+1$ in a recurrent aperiodic infinite word does not exceed $3\Delta \C(n)$, where $\Delta \C (n)$ is the first difference of factor complexity, as shown by Boshernitzan. Pelantov\'a together…
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
We consider questions related to the structure of infinite words (over an integer alphabet) with bounded additive complexity, i.e., words with the property that the number of distinct sums exhibited by factors of the same length is bounded…
We prove that every $n$-letter word over $k$-letter alphabet contains some word as a subsequence in at least $k^{n/4k(1+o(1))}$ many ways, and that this is sharp as $k\to\infty$. For fixed $k$, we show that the analogous number deviates…
A word is square-free if it does not contain a nonempty word of the form $XX$ as a factor. A famous 1906 result of Thue asserts that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. We study square-free words with…
Rich words are characterized by containing the maximum possible number of distinct palindromes. Several characteristic properties of rich words have been studied; yet the analysis of repetitions in rich words still involves some interesting…
In the study of infinite words, various notions of balancedness provide quantitative measures for how regularly letters or factors occur, and they find applications in several areas of mathematics and theoretical computer science. In this…
Let $u \shuffle v$ denote the set of all shuffles of the words $u$ and $v$. It is shown that for each integer $n \geq 3$ there exists a square-free ternary word $u$ of length $n$ such that $u\shuffle u$ contains a square-free word. This…
Initially stated in terms of Beatty sequences, the Fraenkel conjecture can be reformulated as follows: for a $k$-letter alphabet A, with a fixed $k \geq 3$, there exists a unique balanced infinite word, up to letter permutations and shifts,…
A double occurrence word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ is a word in which each alphabet letter appears exactly twice. Such words arise naturally in the study of topology, graph theory, and combinatorics. Recently, double occurrence…
A universal word for a finite alphabet $A$ and some integer $n\geq 1$ is a word over $A$ such that every word in $A^n$ appears exactly once as a subword (cyclically or linearly). It is well-known and easy to prove that universal words exist…
We study words that barely avoid repetitions, for several senses of "barely". A squarefree (respectively, overlap-free, cubefree) word is irreducible if removing any one of its interior letters creates a square (respectively, overlap,…
We prove that for any sequence of binary alphabets $\mathcal{A}_1,\mathcal{A}_2,\dots$, there exists a cube-free word $c_1c_2\dots$ so that $c_1\in\mathcal{A}_1,c_2\in\mathcal{A}_2,\dots$. In particular, for every $n$, there are at least…
A binary shuffle square is a binary word of even length that can be partitioned into two disjoint, identical subwords. Huang, Nam, Thaper, and the first author conjectured that as $n\rightarrow \infty$, asymptotically half of all binary…