Related papers: Fewest repetitions in infinite binary words
Let $s_n$ be the number of words consisting of the ternary alphabet consisting of the digits 0, 1, and 2 such that no subword (or factor) is a square (a word concatenated with itself, e.g., $11$, $1212$, or $102102$). From computational…
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 answer a question of Harju: An infinite square-free ternary word with an $n$-stem factorization exists for any $n\ge 13$. We show that there are uniform ternary morphisms of length $k$ for every $k\ge 23$. This resolves almost completely…
We consider the number of occurrences of subwords (non-consecutive sub-sequences) in a given word. We first define the notion of subword entropy of a given word that measures the maximal number of occurrences among all possible subwords. We…
An abelian square is the concatenation of two words that are anagrams of one another. A word of length $n$ can contain at most $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct factors, and there exist words of length $n$ containing $\Theta(n^2)$ distinct…
A {\em square} is a word of the form $uu$. In this paper we prove that for a given finite word $w$, the number of distinct square factors of $w$ is bounded by $|w|-|\Alphabet(w)|+1$, where $|w|$ denotes the length of $w$ and…
The combinatorics of squares in a word depends on how the equivalence of halves of the square is defined. We consider Abelian squares, parameterized squares, and order-preserving squares. The word $uv$ is an Abelian (parameterized,…
We describe a new non-constructive technique to show that squares are avoidable by an infinite word even if we force some letters from the alphabet to appear at certain occurrences. We show that as long as forced positions are at distance…
Circular words are cyclically ordered finite sequences of letters. We give a computer-free proof of the following result by Currie: square-free circular words over the ternary alphabet exist for all lengths $l$ except for 5, 7, 9, 10, 14,…
A \emph{square} is a word of the form $uu$, where $u$ is a nonempty finite word. Given a finite word $w$ of length $n$, let $[w]$ denote the corresponding \emph{circular word}, i.e., the set of all cyclic rotations of $w$. We study the…
We enumerate all ternary length-l square-free words, which are words avoiding squares of words up to length l, for l<=24. We analyse the singular behaviour of the corresponding generating functions. This leads to new upper entropy bounds…
A word is level if each letter appears in it the same number of times, plus or minus 1. We give a complete characterization of the lengths for which level ternary circular square-free words exist. Key words: combinatorics on words, circular…
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…
The lexicographically least square-free infinite word on the alphabet of non-negative integers with a given prefix $p$ is denoted $L(p)$. When $p$ is the empty word, this word was shown by Guay-Paquet and Shallit to be the ruler sequence.…
A square-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 a square. Grytczuk et al. recently introduced the concept of extremal…
The repetition threshold is the smallest real number $\alpha$ such that there exists an infinite word over a $k$-letter alphabet that avoids repetition of exponent strictly greater than $\alpha$. This notion can be generalized to graph…
Let $S$ be one of $\{aba,bcb\}$ and $\{aba, aca\}$, and let $w$ be an infinite square-free word over $\Sigma=\{a,b,c\}$ with no factor in $S$. Suppose that $f:\Sigma\rightarrow T^*$ is a non-erasing morphism. Word $f(w)$ is square-free if…
For each $\alpha > 2$ there is a binary word with critical exponent $\alpha$.
We say that a finite factor $f$ of a word $w$ is \emph{imaged} if there exists a non-erasing morphism $m$, distinct from the identity, such that $w$ contains $m(f)$. We show that every infinite word contains an imaged factor of length at…
A square is a concatenation of two identical words, and a word $w$ is said to have a square $yy$ if $w$ can be written as $xyyz$ for some words $x$ and $z$. It is known that the ratio of the number of distinct squares in a word to its…