Related papers: A regularity lemma and twins in words
An overlap-free (or $\beta$-free) word $w$ over a fixed alphabet $\Sigma$ is extremal if every word obtained from $w$ by inserting a single letter from $\Sigma$ at any position contains an overlap (or a factor of exponent at least $\beta$,…
A binary word is symmetric if it is a palindrome or an antipalindrome. We define a new measure of asymmetry of a binary word equal to the minimal number of letters of the word whose deleting from the word yields a symmetric word and obtain…
Let $A_{s,k}(m)$ be the maximum number of distinct letters in any sequence which can be partitioned into $m$ contiguous blocks of pairwise distinct letters, has at least $k$ occurrences of every letter, and has no subsequence forming an…
The permutation language $P_n$ consists of all words that are permutations of a fixed alphabet of size $n$. Using divide-and-conquer, we construct a regular expression $R_n$ that specifies $P_n$. We then give explicit bounds for the length…
A word $u=u_1\dots u_n$ is a scattered factor of a word $w$ if $u$ can be obtained from $w$ by deleting some of its letters: there exist the (potentially empty) words $v_0,v_1,..,v_n$ such that $w = v_0u_1v_1...u_nv_n$. The set of all…
A prefix normal word is a binary word with the property that no substring has more 1s than the prefix of the same length. This class of words is important in the context of binary jumbled pattern matching. In this paper we present an…
Zipf's law is a fundamental paradigm in the statistics of written and spoken natural language as well as in other communication systems. We raise the question of the elementary units for which Zipf's law should hold in the most natural way,…
Fraenkel and Simpson showed that the number of distinct squares in a word of length n is bounded from above by 2n, since at most two distinct squares have their rightmost, or last, occurrence begin at each position. Improvements by Ilie to…
We introduce and study a new complexity function in combinatorics on words, which takes into account the smallest second occurrence time of a factor of an infinite word. We characterize the eventually periodic words and the Sturmian words…
A string is said to be closed if its length is one, or if it has a non-empty factor that occurs both as a prefix and as a suffix of the string, but does not occur elsewhere. The notion of closed words was introduced by [Fici, WORDS 2011].…
We study regular expression membership testing: Given a regular expression of size $m$ and a string of size $n$, decide whether the string is in the language described by the regular expression. Its classic $O(nm)$ algorithm is one of the…
We present a new recursive generation algorithm for prefix normal words. These are binary strings with the property that no substring has more 1s than the prefix of the same length. The new algorithm uses two operations on binary strings,…
We study here the so called subsequence pattern matching also known as hidden pattern matching in which one searches for a given pattern $w$ of length $m$ as a subsequence in a random text of length $n$. The quantity of interest is the…
Recently, a short and elegant proof was presented showing that a binary word of length $n$ contains at most $n-3$ runs. Here we show, using the same technique and a computer search, that the number of runs in a binary word of length $n$ is…
A word $w$ is called rich if it contains $| w|+1$ palindromic factors, including the empty word. We say that a rich word $w$ can be extended in at least two ways if there are two distinct letters $x,y$ such that $wx,wy$ are rich. Let $R$…
In the classic longest common substring (LCS) problem, we are given two strings $S$ and $T$, each of length at most $n$, over an alphabet of size $\sigma$, and we are asked to find a longest string occurring as a fragment of both $S$ and…
Given a combinatorial structure, a ``twin'' is a pair of disjoint substructures which are isomorphic (or look the same in some sense). In recent years, there have been many problems about finding large twins in various combinatorial…
A word $w$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is a Lyndon word if there exists an order defined on $\Sigma$ for which $w$ is lexicographically smaller than all of its conjugates (other than itself). We introduce and study \emph{universal Lyndon…
If $x$ is a non-empty string then the repetition $xx$ is called a tandem repeat. Similarly, a tandem in a two dimensional array $X$ is a configuration consisting of a same primitive block $W$ that touch each other with one side or corner.…
We show that the first-order logical theory of the binary overlap-free words (and, more generally, the ${\alpha}$-free words for rational ${\alpha}$, $2 < {\alpha} \leq 7/3$), is decidable. As a consequence, many results previously obtained…