Related papers: Bounds on Zimin Word Avoidance
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…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
Word $W$ is an instance of word $V$ provided there is a homomorphism $\phi$ mapping letters to nonempty words so that $\phi(V) = W$. For example, taking $\phi$ such that $\phi(c)=fr$, $\phi(o)=e$ and $\phi(l)=zer$, we see that "freezer" is…
A set X of partial words over a finite alphabet A is called unavoidable if every two-sided infinite word over A has a factor compatible with an element of X. Unlike the case of a set of words without holes, the problem of deciding whether…
Free words are elements of a free monoid, generated over an alphabet via the binary operation of concatenation. Casually speaking, a free word is a finite string of letters. Henceforth, we simply refer to them as words. Motivated by recent…
Zimin words are very special finite words which are closely related to the pattern-avoidability problem. This problem consists in testing if an instance of a given pattern with variables occurs in almost all words over any finite alphabet.…
A word $w$ is said to contain the pattern $P$ if there is a way to substitute a nonempty word for each letter in $P$ so that the resulting word is a subword of $w$. Bean, Ehrenfeucht and McNulty and, independently, Zimin characterised the…
In combinatorics on words, a word $w$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is said to avoid a pattern $p$ over an alphabet $\Delta$ of variables if there is no factor $f$ of $w$ such that $f=h(p)$ where $h:\Delta^*\to\Sigma^*$ is a non-erasing…
In the area of pattern avoidability the central role is played by special words called Zimin patterns. The symbols of these patterns are treated as variables and the rank of the pattern is its number of variables. Zimin type of a word $x$…
The set of all avoidable patterns in n or fewer letters can be avoided on an alphabet with 2(n+2) letters.
We consider avoiding mesosomes -- that is, words of the form $xx'$ with $x'$ a conjugate of $x$ that is different from $x$ -- over a binary alphabet. We give a structure theorem for mesosome-avoiding words, count how many there are,…
The relationship between the length of a word and the maximum length of its unbordered factors is investigated in this paper. Consider a finite word w of length n. We call a word bordered, if it has a proper prefix which is also a suffix of…
A word contains a \emph{half-flip} if it contains non-empty factors $uv$ and $vu$ where $|u|=|v|$. Fici reports a non-constructive proof of the existence of an infinite word over a finite alphabet avoiding half-flips and asks for the size…
An infinte word w avoids a pattern p with the involution t if there is no substitution for the variables in p and no involution t such that the resulting word is a factor of w. We investigate the avoidance of patterns with respect to the…
This paper gives a short overview of Zimin words, and proves an interesting property of their distribution. Let $L_q^m$ to be the lexically ordered sequence of $q$-ary words of length $m$, and let $T_n(L_q^m)$ to be the binary sequence…
The palindromic length of the finite word $v$ is equal to the minimal number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to $v$. It was conjectured in 2013 that for every infinite aperiodic word $x$, the palindromic length of its factors is…
We say that a word $w$ on a totally ordered alphabet avoids the word $v$ if there are no subsequences in $w$ order-equivalent to $v$. In this paper we suggest a new approach to the enumeration of words on at most $k$ letters avoiding a…
Recently, Grytczuk, Kordulewski, and Niewiadomski defined an extremal word over an alphabet $\mathbb{A}$ to be a word with the property that inserting any letter from $\mathbb{A}$ at any position in the word yields a given pattern. In this…
We start by considering binary words containing the minimum possible numbers of squares and antisquares (where an antisquare is a word of the form $x \overline{x}$), and we completely classify which possibilities can occur. We consider…
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…