Related papers: A regularity lemma and twins in words
We study the succinctness of the complement and intersection of regular expressions. In particular, we show that when constructing a regular expression defining the complement of a given regular expression, a double exponential size…
We exhibit a recurrence on the number of discrete line segments joining two integer points in the plane using an encoding of such segments as balanced words of given length and height over the two-letter alphabet $\{0,1\}$. We give…
Fici and Saarela ([2]) conjectured that a binary word of length n contains at least $\lfloor n/4 \rfloor$ abelian squares. We slightly extend this conjecture and show that it holds in some special cases. In all other cases we have the…
Given a string $T$ with length $n$ whose characters are drawn from an ordered alphabet of size $\sigma$, its longest Lyndon subsequence is a longest subsequence of $T$ that is a Lyndon word. We propose algorithms for finding such a…
For $d\ge 1$, a word $w\in \{ 0,1\}^{\Z^d}$ is called balanced if there exists $M > 0$ such that for any two rectangles $R, R^{'}\subset\Z^d$ that are translates of each other, the number of occurrences of the symbol $1$ in $R$ and $R^{'}$…
We present a method which displays all palindromes of a given length from De Bruijn words of a certain order, and also a recursive one which constructs all palindromes of length $n+1$ from the set of palindromes of length $n$. We show that…
For a sequence $S$ of terms from an abelian group $G$ of length $|S|$, let $\Sigma_n(S)$ denote the set of all elements that can be represented as the sum of terms in some $n$-term subsequence of $S$. When the subsum set is very small,…
With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…
In this paper we consider the problem of computing the longest common abelian factor (LCAF) between two given strings. We present a simple $O(\sigma~ n^2)$ time algorithm, where $n$ is the length of the strings and $\sigma$ is the alphabet…
Enumerating the number of times one word occurs in another is a much-studied combinatorial subject. By utilizing a method that we call ``lexicographic extreme referencing'', we provide a formula for computing occurrences of one binary word…
A balanced word is one in which any two factors of the same length contain the same number of each letter of the alphabet up to one. Finite binary balanced words are called Sturmian words. A Sturmian word is bispecial if it can be extended…
The Shortest Common Supersequence problem (SCS for short) consists in finding a shortest common supersequence of a finite set of words on a fixed alphabet Sigma. It is well-known that its decision version denoted [SR8] in [Garey and…
In a recent article by Chapuy and Perarnau, it was shown that a uniformly chosen automaton on $n$ states with a $2$-letter alphabet has a synchronizing word of length $O(\sqrt{n}\log n)$ with high probability. In this note, we improve this…
Squares (fragments of the form $xx$, for some string $x$) are arguably the most natural type of repetition in strings. The basic algorithmic question concerning squares is to check if a given string of length $n$ is square-free, that is,…
Let $a_1,\dotsc,a_n$ be a permutation of $[n]$. Two disjoint order-isomorphic subsequences are called \emph{twins}. We show that every permutation of $[n]$ contains twins of length $\Omega(n^{3/5})$ improving the trivial bound of…
A square is the concatenation of a nonempty word with itself. A word has period p if its letters at distance p match. The exponent of a nonempty word is the quotient of its length over its smallest period. In this article we give a proof of…
Given a family $\mathcal{F}$ of subsets of $[n]$, we say two sets $A, B \in \mathcal{F}$ are comparable if $A \subset B$ or $B \subset A$. Sperner's celebrated theorem gives the size of the largest family without any comparable pairs. This…
A word $u$ is a subsequence of another word $w$ if $u$ can be obtained from $w$ by deleting some of its letters. The word $w$ with alph$(w)=\Sigma$ is called $k$-subsequence universal if the set of subsequences of length $k$ of $w$ contains…
To any infinite word w over a finite alphabet A we can associate two infinite words min(w) and max(w) such that any prefix of min(w) (resp. max(w)) is the lexicographically smallest (resp. greatest) amongst the factors of w of the same…
A deterministic finite automaton (DFA) separates two strings $w$ and $x$ if it accepts $w$ and rejects $x$. The minimum number of states required for a DFA to separate $w$ and $x$ is denoted by $sep(w,x)$. The present paper shows that the…