Related papers: Composing short 3-compressing words on a 2 letter …
We study the computational complexity of various problems related to synchronization of weakly acyclic automata, a subclass of widely studied aperiodic automata. We provide upper and lower bounds on the length of a shortest word…
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…
The states of a deterministic finite automaton A can be identified with collections of words in Pf(L(A)) -- the set of prefixes of words belonging to the regular language accepted by A. But words can be ordered and among the many possible…
A {\em subsequence} of a word $w$ is a word $u$ that can be obtained by deleting some letters from $w$ while maintaining the relative order of the remaining letters, e.g., $\mathtt{lala}$ is a subsequence of $\mathtt{alfalfa}$. A word, over…
The article focuses on word (or string) attractors, which are sets of positions related to the text compression efficiency of the underlying word. The article presents two combinatorial algorithms based on Suffix automata or Directed…
A factor $u$ of a word $w$ is a cover of $w$ if every position in $w$ lies within some occurrence of $u$ in $w$. A word $w$ covered by $u$ thus generalizes the idea of a repetition, that is, a word composed of exact concatenations of $u$.…
A deterministic finite automaton in which every non-empty set of states occurs as the image of the whole state set under the action of a suitable input word is called completely reachable. It was conjectured that in each completely…
We study words that barely avoid repetitions, for several senses of "barely". A squarefree (respectively, overlap-free, cubefree) word is irreducible if removing any one of its interior letters creates a square (respectively, overlap,…
In this paper we describe an approach to finding the shortest reset word of a finite synchronizing automaton by using a SAT solver. We use this approach to perform an experimental study of the length of the shortest reset word of a finite…
The normalized substring complexity $\delta$ of a string is defined as $\max_k \{c[k]/k\}$, where $c[k]$ is the number of \textit{distinct} substrings of length $k$. This simply defined measure has recently attracted attention due to its…
To any infinite word w over a finite alphabet A we can associate two infinite words min(w) and max(w) such that any prefix of min(w) (resp. max(w)) is the lexicographically smallest (resp. greatest) amongst the factors of w of the same…
Imagine an assembly line where a box with a lid and liquid in it enters in some unknown orientation. The box should leave the line with the open lid facing upwards with the liquid still in it. To save costs there are no complex sensors or…
We prove a density version of the Carlson--Simpson Theorem. Specifically we show the following. For every integer $k\geq 2$ and every set $A$ of words over $k$ satisfying \[\limsup_{n\to\infty} \frac{|A\cap [k]^n|}{k^n}>0\] there exist a…
The downward closure of a language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of every language is regular. Moreover, recent results show that downward closures are…
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 word $w$ is called a reaching word of a subset $S$ of states in a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) if $S$ is the image of $Q$ under the action of $w$. A DFA is called completely reachable if every non-empty subset of the state set has…
A function on a discrete group is weakly combable if its discrete derivative with respect to a combing can be calculated by a finite state automaton. A weakly combable function is bicombable if it is Lipschitz in both the left and right…
Twins in a finite word are formed by a pair of identical subwords placed at disjoint sets of positions. We investigate the maximum length of twins in a random word over a $k$-letter alphabet. The obtained lower bounds for small values of…
We study the sensitivity of the Lempel-Ziv 77 compression algorithm to edits, showing how modifying a string $w$ can deteriorate or improve its compression. Our first result is a tight upper bound for $k$ edits: $\forall w' \in B(w,k)$, we…
We introduce a subclass of the commutative regular languages that is characterized by the property that the state set of the minimal deterministic automaton can be written as a certain Cartesian product. This class behaves much better with…