Related papers: Remarks on Privileged Words
We investigate the problem of the maximum number of cubic subwords (of the form $www$) in a given word. We also consider square subwords (of the form $ww$). The problem of the maximum number of squares in a word is not well understood.…
A word $u$ is a scattered factor of $w$ if $u$ can be obtained from $w$ by deleting some of its letters. That is, there exist the (potentially empty) words $u_1,u_2,..., u_n$, and $v_0,v_1,..,v_n$ such that $u = u_1u_2...u_n$ and $w =…
Let S be a finite set of words over an alphabet Sigma. The set S is said to be complete if every word w over the alphabet Sigma is a factor of some element of S*, i.e. w belongs to Fact(S*). Otherwise if S is not complete, we are interested…
A border u of a word w is a proper factor of w occurring both as a prefix and as a suffix. The maximal unbordered factor of w is the longest factor of w which does not have a border. Here an O(n log n)-time with high probability (or O(n log…
A position $p$ in a word $w$ is critical if the minimal local period at $p$ is equal to the global period of $w$. According to the Critical Factorisation Theorem all words of length at least two have a critical point. We study the number…
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…
The block reversal of a word $w$, denoted by $\mathtt{BR}(w)$, is a generalization of the concept of the reversal of a word, obtained by concatenating the blocks of the word in the reverse order. We characterize non-binary and binary words…
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…
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…
We consider several novel aspects of unique factorization in formal languages. We reprove the familiar fact that the set uf(L) of words having unique factorization into elements of L is regular if L is regular, and from this deduce an…
When flipping a fair coin, let $W = L_1L_2...L_N$ with $L_i\in\{H,T\}$ be a binary word of length $N=2$ or $N=3$. In this paper, we establish second- and third-order linear recurrence relations and their generating functions to discuss the…
Ulam words are binary words defined recursively as follows: the length-$1$ Ulam words are $0$ and $1$, and a binary word of length $n$ is Ulam if and only if it is expressible uniquely as a concatenation of two shorter, distinct Ulam words.…
We consider words $w$ over the alphabet $\Sigma=\{0,1,2\}$. It is shown that there are irreducibly square-free words of all lengths $n$ except 4,5,7 and 12. Such a word is square-free (i.e., it has no repetitions $uu$ as factors), but by…
In this note we provide a (decidable) graph-structural characterisation of the infiniteness of $L(w_1, ..., w_k)$, where $L(w_1, ..., w_k) = \{w \in A^* | |w|_{w_1} = \cdots = |w|_{w_k}\}$ is the set of all words that contain the same…
Trapezoidal words are finite words having at most n+1 distinct factors of length n, for every n>=0. They encompass finite Sturmian words. We distinguish trapezoidal words into two disjoint subsets: open and closed trapezoidal words. A…
Words are sequences of letters over a finite alphabet. We study two intimately related topics for this object: quasi-randomness and limit theory. With respect to the first topic we investigate the notion of uniform distribution of letters…
A pattern is encountered in a word if some infix of the word is the image of the pattern under some non-erasing morphism. A pattern $p$ is unavoidable if, over every finite alphabet, every sufficiently long word encounters $p$. A theorem by…
We examine words w satisfying the following property: if x is a subword of w and |x| is at least k for some fixed k, then the reversal of x is not a subword of w.
We study word reconstruction problems. Improving a previous result by P. Fleischmann, M. Lejeune, F. Manea, D. Nowotka and M. Rigo, we prove that, for any unknown word $w$ of length $n$ over an alphabet of cardinality $k$, $w$ can be…
Let $w$ be a finite word over the alphabet $\{0,1\}$. For any natural number $n$, let $s_w(n)$ denote the number of occurrence of $w$ in the binary expansion of $n$ as a scattered subsequence. We study the behavior of the partial sum…