Related papers: A regularity lemma and twins in words
Any finite word $w$ of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is reached, the word $w$ is called rich. The number of rich words of length $n$ over an alphabet of cardinality $q$ is denoted…
In combinatorics on words, a word w of length n over an alphabet of size q is said to be privileged if n <= 1 or if n >= 2 and w has a privileged border that occurs exactly twice in w. Forsyth, Jayakumar and Shallit proved that there exist…
Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…
The sequence of partial sums of Fibonacci numbers, beginning with $2$, $4$, $7$, $12$, $20$, $33,\dots$, has several combinatorial interpretations (OEIS A000071). For instance, the $n$-th term in this sequence is the number of length-$n$…
Central, standard, and Christoffel words are three strongly interrelated classes of binary finite words which represent a finite counterpart of characteristic Sturmian words. A natural arithmetization of the theory is obtained by…
We find generating functions for the number of words avoiding certain patterns or sets of patterns on at most 2 distinct letters and determine which of them are equally avoided. We also find the exact number of words avoiding certain…
The numbers we study in this paper are of the form $B_{n, p}(k)$, which is the number of binary words of length $n$ that contain the word $p$ (as a subsequence) exactly $k$ times. Our motivation comes from the analogous study of pattern…
We generalise a multiple string pattern matching algorithm, recently proposed by Fredriksson and Grabowski [J. Discr. Alg. 7, 2009], to deal with arbitrary dictionaries on an alphabet of size $s$. If $r_m$ is the number of words of length…
A prefix normal word is a binary word whose prefixes contain at least as many 1s as any of its factors of the same length. Introduced by Fici and Lipt\'ak in 2011 the notion of prefix normality is so far only defined for words over the…
Given two languages, a separator is a third language that contains the first one and is disjoint from the second one. We investigate the following decision problem: given two regular input languages of finite words, decide whether there…
We consider the asymptotic minimum density $f(s,k)$ of monotone $k$-subwords of words over a totally ordered alphabet of size $s$. The unrestricted alphabet case, $f(\infty,k)$, is well-studied, known for $f(\infty,3)$ and $f(\infty,4)$,…
A circular word, or a necklace, is an equivalence class under conjugation of a word. A fundamental question concerning regularities in standard words is bounding the number of distinct squares in a word of length $n$. The famous conjecture…
The subword complexity of a finite word $w$ of length $N$ is a function which associates to each $n\le N$ the number of all distinct subwords of $w$ having the length $n$. We define the \emph{maximal complexity} C(w) as the maximum of the…
A flip-swap language is a set S of binary strings of length n such that $S \cup 0^n$ is closed under two operations (when applicable): (1) Flip the leftmost 1; and (2) Swap the leftmost 1 with the bit to its right. Flip-swap languages model…
Tandem duplication in DNA is the process of inserting a copy of a segment of DNA adjacent to the original position. Motivated by applications that store data in living organisms, Jain {\em et al.} (2016) proposed the study of codes that…
A non-empty word $w$ is a border of the word $u$ if $\vert w\vert<\vert u\vert$ and $w$ is both a prefix and a suffix of $u$. A word $u$ with the border $w$ is closed if $u$ has exactly two occurrences of $w$. A word $u$ is privileged if…
The Binary Jumbled String Matching problem is defined as: Given a string $s$ over $\{a,b\}$ of length $n$ and a query $(x,y)$, with $x,y$ non-negative integers, decide whether $s$ has a substring $t$ with exactly $x$ $a$'s and $y$ $b$'s.…
A string $w$ is called a minimal absent word (MAW) for a string $S$ if $w$ does not occur as a substring in $S$ and all proper substrings of $w$ occur in $S$. MAWs are well-studied combinatorial string objects that have potential…
Given a random text over a finite alphabet, we study the frequencies at which fixed-length words occur as subsequences. As the data size grows, the joint distribution of word counts exhibits a rich asymptotic structure. We investigate all…
Let $\mathcal{A}$ be a sequence of $rk$ terms which is made up of $k$ distinct integers each appearing exactly $r$ times in $\mathcal{A}$. The sum of all terms of a subsequence of $\mathcal{A}$ is called a subsequence sum of $\mathcal{A}$.…