Related papers: Normal, Abby Normal, Prefix Normal

A binary shuffle square is a binary word of even length that can be partitioned into two disjoint, identical subwords. Huang, Nam, Thaper, and the first author conjectured that as $n\rightarrow \infty$, asymptotically half of all binary…

In this paper we study the enumeration and the construction, according to the number of ones, of particular binary words avoiding a fixed pattern. The growth of such words can be described by particular jumping and marked succession rules.…

The subword complexity of a word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ is a function that assigns for each positive integer $n$, the number of distinct subwords of length $n$ in $w$. The subword complexity of a word is a good measure of…

For a fixed alphabet $A$, an infinite sequence $X$ is said to be normal if every word $w$ over $A$ appears in $X$ with the same frequency as any other word of the same length. A classical result of Agafonov (1966) relates normality to…

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…

Let w be a binary string and let a_w (n) be the number of occurrences of the word w in the binary expansion of n. As usual we let s(n) denote the Stern sequence; that is, s(0)=0, s(1)=1, and for n >= 1, s(2n)=s(n) and s(2n+1)=s(n)+s(n+1).…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between context-free grammars and normal ordering problem, and then to explore various extensions of the Stirling grammar. We present grammatical characterizations of several well…

A double occurrence word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ is a word in which each alphabet letter appears exactly twice. Such words arise naturally in the study of topology, graph theory, and combinatorics. Recently, double occurrence…

A finite word $w$ of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is attained, the word $w$ is called rich. An infinite word $w$ is called rich if every finite factor of $w$ is rich. Let $w$ be a word…

We investigate certain word-construction games with variable turn orders. In these games, Alice and Bob take turns on choosing consecutive letters of a word of fixed length, with Alice winning if the result lies in a predetermined target…

The regular languages with a neutral letter expressible in first-order logic with one alternation are characterized. Specifically, it is shown that if an arbitrary $\Sigma_2$ formula defines a regular language with a neutral letter, then…

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…

A constant weight binary code consists of $n$-bit binary codewords, each with exactly $w$ bits equal to 1, such that any two codewords are at least Hamming distance $d$ apart. $A(n,d,w)$ is the maximum size of a constant weight binary code…

A real number $x$ is absolutely normal if, for every base $b\ge 2$, every two equally long strings of digits appear with equal asymptotic frequency in the base-$b$ expansion of $x$. This paper presents an explicit algorithm that generates…

For a fixed alphabet A, an infinite sequence X is said to be normal if every word w over A appears in X with the same frequency as any other word of the same length. A classical result relates normality to finite automata as follows: a…

The prefix exchange distance of a permutation is the minimum number of exchanges involving the leftmost element that sorts the permutation. We give new combinatorial proofs of known results on the distribution of the prefix exchange…

We begin with a new analysis of formal words. Let w be a formal word in letters g_1,...,g_k. The word map associated with w maps the permutations s_1,...,s_k in S_n to the permutation obtained by replacing for each i, every occurrence of…

A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] , \dots w[i_{|u|}]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq |w|$. A word $w$ is $k$-subsequence universal over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if every word…

A language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is prefix-convex if, for any words $x,y,z\in\Sigma^*$, whenever $x$ and $xyz$ are in $L$, then so is $xy$. Prefix-convex languages include right-ideal, prefix-closed, and prefix-free languages. We…

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.…