Related papers: Bounds on Zimin Word Avoidance
We study the problems of finding a shortest synchronizing word and its length for a given prefix code. This is done in two different settings: when the code is defined by an arbitrary decoder recognizing its star and when the code is…
The notion of Abelian complexity of infinite words was recently used by the three last authors to investigate various Abelian properties of words. In particular, using van der Waerden's theorem, they proved that if a word avoids Abelian…
The palindromic length $\text{PL}(v)$ of a finite word $v$ is the minimal number of palindromes whose concatenation is equal to $v$. In 2013, Frid, Puzynina, and Zamboni conjectured that: If $w$ is an infinite word and $k$ is an integer…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…
In this paper we consider the following problems: how many different subsets of Sigma^n can occur as set of all length-n factors of a finite word? If a subset is representable, how long a word do we need to represent it? How many such…
We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…
A finite set S of words over the alphabet A is called non-complete if Fact(S*) is different from A*. A word w in A* - Fact(S*) is said to be uncompletable. We present a series of non-complete sets S_k whose minimal uncompletable words have…
The subword complexity of a finite word $w$ of length $N$ is a function which associates to each $n\le N$ the number of all distinct subwords of $w$ having the length $n$. We define the \emph{maximal complexity} C(w) as the maximum of the…
The \emph{Hamming distance} $\text{ham}(u,v)$ between two equal-length words $u$, $v$ is the number of positions where $u$ and $v$ differ. The words $u$ and $v$ are said to be \emph{conjugates} if there exist non-empty words $x,y$ such that…
A finite word $f$ is Hamming-isometric if for any two word $u$ and $v$ of same length avoiding $f$, $u$ can be transformed into $v$ by changing one by one all the letters on which $u$ differs from $v$, in such a way that all of the new…
Two words $p$ and $q$ are avoided by the same number of length-$n$ words, for all $n$, precisely when $p$ and $q$ have the same set of border lengths. Previous proofs of this theorem use generating functions but do not provide an explicit…
The study of word equations (or the existential theory of equations over free monoids) is a central topic in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The problem of deciding whether a given word equation has a solution was shown to be…
A word $w=w_1w_2\cdots w_n$ is alternating if either $w_1<w_2>w_3<w_4>\cdots$ (when the word is up-down) or $w_1>w_2<w_3>w_4<\cdots$ (when the word is down-up). The study of alternating words avoiding classical permutation patterns was…
A prefix normal word is a binary word with the property that no substring has more 1s than the prefix of the same length. This class of words is important in the context of binary jumbled pattern matching. In this paper we present an…
It is known that there are infinite words over finite alphabets with Abelian repetition threshold arbitrarily close to 1; however, the construction previously used involves huge alphabets. In this note we give a short cyclic morphism…
A biologically unavoidable sequence is an infinite gender sequence which occurs in every gendered, infinite genealogical network satisfying certain tame conditions. We show that every eventually periodic sequence is biologically unavoidable…
A morphic word is obtained by iterating a morphism to generate an infinite word, and then applying a coding. We characterize morphic words with polynomial growth in terms of a new type of infinite word called a $\textit{zigzag word}$. A…
With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…
Every finite group $G$ has a normal series each of whose factors is either a solvable group or a direct product of non-abelian simple groups. The minimum number of nonsolvable factors, attained on all possible such series in $G$, is called…