Related papers: Borders, Palindrome Prefixes, and Square Prefixes
We study the set of finite words with zero palindromic defect, i.e., words rich in palindromes. This set is factorial, but not recurrent. We focus on description of pairs of rich words which cannot occur simultaneously as factors of a…
We study infinite binary words that contain few distinct palindromes. In particular, we classify such words according to their critical exponents. This extends results by Fici and Zamboni [TCS 2013]. Interestingly, the words with 18 and 20…
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…
Circular words are cyclically ordered finite sequences of letters. We give a computer-free proof of the following result by Currie: square-free circular words over the ternary alphabet exist for all lengths $l$ except for 5, 7, 9, 10, 14,…
We construct infinite cubefree binary words containing exponentially many distinct squares of length n. We also show that for every positive integer n, there is a cubefree binary square of length 2n.
A prefix normal word is a binary word whose prefixes contain at least as many 1s as any of its factors of the same length. Introduced by Fici and Lipt\'ak in 2011 the notion of prefix normality is so far only defined for words over the…
Fixed points ${\bf u}=\varphi({\bf u})$ of marked and primitive morphisms $\varphi$ over arbitrary alphabet are considered. We show that if ${\bf u}$ is palindromic, i.e., its language contains infinitely many palindromes, then some power…
We prove an inequality for the number of periods in a word x in terms of the length of x and its initial critical exponent. Next, we characterize all periods of the length-n prefix of a characteristic Sturmian word in terms of the lazy…
A language L is prefix-free if, whenever words u and v are in L and u is a prefix of v, then u=v. Suffix-, factor-, and subword-free languages are defined similarly, where "subword" means "subsequence". A language is bifix-free if it is…
In 2011, Fici and Lipt\'ak introduced prefix normal words. A binary word is prefix normal if it has no factor (substring) that contains more occurrences of the letter 1 than the prefix of the same length. Among the open problems regarding…
A cross-bifix-free code is a set of words in which no prefix of any length of any word is the suffix of any word in the set. Cross-bifix-free codes arise in the study of distributed sequences for frame synchronization. We provide a new…
We say a finite word $x$ is a palindromic periodicity if there exist two palindromes $p$ and $s$ such that $|x| \geq |ps|$ and $x$ is a prefix of the word $(ps)^\omega = pspsps\cdots$. In this paper we examine the palindromic periodicities…
Given a string $s$ of length $n$ over a general alphabet and an integer $k$, the problem is to decide whether $s$ is a concatenation of $k$ nonempty palindromes. Two previously known solutions for this problem work in time $O(kn)$ and…
Finite alphabets of at least three letters permit the construction of square-free words of infinite length. We show that the entropy density is strictly positive and derive reasonable lower and upper bounds. Finally, we present an…
A square is the concatenation of a nonempty word with itself. A word has period p if its letters at distance p match. The exponent of a nonempty word is the quotient of its length over its smallest period. In this article we give a proof of…
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 results…
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…
Following earlier work by Aldo de Luca and others, we study trapezoidal words and their prefixes, with respect to their characteristic parameters $K$ and $R$ (length of shortest unrepeated suffix, and shortest length without right special…
Although real-world text datasets, such as DNA sequences, are far from being uniformly random, average-case string searching algorithms perform significantly better than worst-case ones in most applications of interest. In this paper, we…
In 2013, Fici and Zamboni proved a number of theorems about finite and infinite words having only a small number of factors that are palindromes. In this paper we rederive some of their results, and obtain some new ones, by a different…