Related papers: $k$-Foldability of Words
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
A left-variable word over an alphabet~$A$ is a word over~$A \cup \{\star\}$ whose first letter is the distinguished symbol~$\star$ standing for a placeholder. The Ordered Variable Word theorem ($\mathsf{OVW}$), also known as…
In this short note, we first associate a new simple undirected graph with a given word over an ordered alphabet of $n$-letters. We will call it the Lyndon graph of that word. Then, we introduce the concept of the Lyndon-word representable…
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…
We establish a tantalizing symmetry of certain numbers refining the Narayana numbers. In terms of Dyck paths, this symmetry is interpreted in the following way: if $w_{n,k,m}$ is the number of Dyck paths of semilength $n$ with $k$…
Recall that an excedance of a permutation $\pi$ is any position $i$ such that $\pi_i > i$. Inspired by the work of Hopkins, McConville and Propp (Elec. J. Comb., 2017) on sorting using toppling, we say that a permutation is toppleable if it…
When $k|n$, the tree $\mathrm{Comb}_{n,k}$ consists of a path containing $n/k$ vertices, each of whose vertices has a disjoint path length $k-1$ beginning at it. We show that, for any $k=k(n)$ and $\epsilon>0$, the binomial random graph…
A universal partial cycle (or upcycle) for $\mathcal{A}^n$ is a cyclic sequence that covers each word of length $n$ over the alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ exactly once -- like a De Bruijn cycle, except that we also allow a wildcard symbol…
An RNA sequence is a string composed of four types of nucleotides, $A, C, G$, and $U$. The goal of the RNA folding problem is to find a maximum cardinality set of crossing-free pairs of the form $\{A,U\}$ or $\{C,G\}$ in a given RNA…
A word $\bar{w} = \bar{u}\bar{u}$ is a $long$ $square$ if $\bar{u}$ is of length at least 3; a word $\bar{w}$ is $long$-$square$-$free$ if $\bar{w}$ contains no sub-word that is a long square. We can use words to generate graph colorings; a…
The factor complexity function $C_w(n)$ of a finite or infinite word $w$ counts the number of distinct factors of $w$ of length $n$ for each $n \ge 0$. A finite word $w$ of length $|w|$ is said to be trapezoidal if the graph of its factor…
We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…
A graph $G=(V,E)$ is word-representable if there exists a word $w$ over the alphabet $V$ such that letters $x$ and $y$ alternate in $w$ if and only if $xy\in E$. For integers $n>k>0 $, the shift graph $G(n,k)$ is the graph whose vertex set…
Since the 90's, several authors have studied a probability distribution on the set of Boolean functions on $n$ variables induced by some probability distributions on formulas built upon the connectors $And$ and $Or$ and the literals…
For every integer $k\geq 2$ let $[k]^{<\mathbb{N}}$ be the set of all words over $k$, that is, all finite sequences having values in $[k]:=\{1,...,k\}$. A Carlson-Simpson tree of $[k]^{<\mathbb{N}}$ of dimension $m\geq 1$ is a subset of…
In this paper we investigate local to global phenomena for a new family of complexity functions of infinite words indexed by $k \in \Ni \cup \{+\infty\}$ where $\Ni$ denotes the set of positive integers. Two finite words $u$ and $v$ in…
We prove several decidability and undecidability results for the satisfiability and validity problems for languages that can express solutions to word equations with length constraints. The atomic formulas over this language are equality…
We consider first-order logic with monoidal quantifiers over words. We show that all languages with a neutral letter, definable using the addition numerical predicate are also definable with the order predicate as the only numerical…
We introduce the notion of doubly rooted plane trees and give a decomposition of these trees, called the butterfly decomposition which turns out to have many applications. From the butterfly decomposition we obtain a one-to-one…
Martin Klazar computed the total weight of ordered trees under 12 different notions of weight. The last and perhaps most interesting of these weights, w_{12}, led to a recurrence relation and an identity for which he requested combinatorial…