Related papers: Subword complexity and power avoidance

We re-examine previous constructions of infinite binary words containing few distinct squares with the goal of finding the "simplest", in a certain sense. We exhibit several new constructions. Rather than using tedious case-based arguments…

We study descriptive complexity properties of the class of regular bifix-free languages, which is the intersection of prefix-free and suffix-free regular languages. We show that there exist a single ternary universal (stream of) bifix-free…

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…

A tangram is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Thus it can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The \emph{cut number} of a tangram is the minimum number of required cuts in this…

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…

An overlap-free (or $\beta$-free) word $w$ over a fixed alphabet $\Sigma$ is extremal if every word obtained from $w$ by inserting a single letter from $\Sigma$ at any position contains an overlap (or a factor of exponent at least $\beta$,…

Repetition avoidance has been studied since Thue's work. In this paper, we considered another type of repetition, which is called pseudo-power. This concept is inspired by Watson-Crick complementarity in DNA sequence and is defined over an…

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,…

We give an in depth analysis of the subwords of the Thue-Morse sequence. This allows us to prove that there are infinitely many injective primitive substitutions with Perron-Frobenius eigenvalue 2 that generate a symbolic dynamical system…

Entringer, Jackson, and Schatz conjectured in 1974 that every infinite cubefree binary word contains arbitrarily long squares. In this paper we show this conjecture is false: there exist infinite cubefree binary words avoiding all squares…

In this paper we study the maximal pattern complexity of infinite words up to Abelian equivalence. We compute a lower bound for the Abelian maximal pattern complexity of infinite words which are both recurrent and aperiodic by projection.…

In previous work, Currie and Rampersad showed that the growth of the number of binary words avoiding the pattern xxx^R was intermediate between polynomial and exponential. We now show that the same holds for the growth of the number of…

Let $A_q$ be a $q$-letter alphabet and $w$ be a right infinite word on this alphabet. A subword of $w$ is a block of consecutive letters of $w$. The subword complexity function of $w$ assigns to each positive integer $n$ the number $f_w(n)$…

In this paper we introduce and study a new complexity measure for finite words. For positive integer $d$ special scattered subwords, called super-$d$-subwords, in which the gaps are of length at least $(d-1)$, are defined. We give methods…

We show that, with the exception of the words $a^2ba^2$ and $b^2ab^2$, all (finite or infinite) binary patterns in the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence can actually be found in that sequence as segments (up to exchange of letters in the infinite…

Letting $w$ denote a finite, nonempty word, let $\text{red}(w)$ denote the word obtained from $w$ by replacing every subword $s$ of $w$ of the form $cc \cdots c$ for a given character $c$ (such that there is no character immediately to the…

We prove results about subshifts with linear (word) complexity, meaning that $\limsup \frac{p(n)}{n} < \infty$, where for every $n$, $p(n)$ is the number of $n$-letter words appearing in sequences in the subshift. Denoting this limsup by…

We study the asymptotics and fine-scale behavior of quantitative combinatorial measures of infinite words and related dynamical and algebraic structures. We construct infinite recurrent words $w$ whose complexity functions $p_w(n)$ are…

We consider word complexity and topological entropy for random substitution subshifts. In contrast to previous work, we do not assume that the underlying random substitution is compatible. We show that the subshift of a primitive random…

We exhibit subshifts admitting weakly mixing (probability) measures, for arbitrary $\epsilon > 0$, with word complexity $p$ satisfying $\limsup \frac{p(q)}{q} < 1.5 + \epsilon$. For arbitrary $f(q) \to \infty$, said subshifts can be made to…