Related papers: Universal arrays
Consider a $q$-ary block code satisfying the property that no $l$-letters long codeword's prefix occurs as a suffix of any codeword for $l$ inside some interval. We determine a general upper bound on the maximum size of these codes and a…
We give a generalization of Kung's theorem on critical exponents of linear codes over a finite field, in terms of sums of extended weight polynomials of linear codes. For all i=k+1,...,n, we give an upper bound on the smallest integer m…
We present two ways in which an infinite universal alphabet may be generated using a novel rewrite system that conserves zero (a special character of the alphabet and the symbol for that character) at every step. The recursive method…
The combinatorics of squares in a word depends on how the equivalence of halves of the square is defined. We consider Abelian squares, parameterized squares, and order-preserving squares. The word $uv$ is an Abelian (parameterized,…
We consider partial words with a unique position starting a power. We show that over a $k$ letter alphabet, a partial word with a unique position starting a square can contain at most $k$ squares. This is in contrast to full words which can…
The recently confirmed Dejean's conjecture about the threshold between avoidable and unavoidable powers of words gave rise to interesting and challenging problems on the structure and growth of threshold words. Over any finite alphabet with…
A pattern $\alpha$ is a string of variables and terminal letters. We say that $\alpha$ matches a word $w$, consisting only of terminal letters, if $w$ can be obtained by replacing the variables of $\alpha$ by terminal words. The matching…
A square is a word of the form $xx$ for a non-empty word $x$. Brlek and Li [Comb. Theory, 2025] proved that the number of distinct squares in a word $w$ of length $n$ is at most $n - \sigma$, where $\sigma$ is the number of letters used in…
We investigate the variance of the length of the longest common subsequences of two independent random words of size $n$, where the letters of one word are i.i.d. uniformly drawn from $\{\alpha_1, \alpha_2, \cdots, \alpha_m\}$, while the…
This note is an attempt to attack a conjecture of Fraenkel and Simpson stated in 1998 concerning the number of distinct squares in a finite word. By counting the number of (right-)special factors, we give an upper bound of the number of…
In this note, we are interested in obtaining uniform upper bounds for the number of powerful numbers in short intervals $(x, x + y]$. We obtain unconditional upper bounds $O(\frac{y}{\log y})$ and $O(y^{11/12})$ for all powerful numbers and…
Building an infinite square-free word by appending one letter at a time while simultaneously avoiding the creation of squares is most likely to fail. When the alphabet has two letters this approach is impossible. When the alphabet has three…
For every $n\geq 27$, we show that the number of $n/(n-1)^+$-free words (i.e., threshold words) of length $k$ on $n$ letters grows exponentially in $k$. This settles all but finitely many cases of a conjecture of Ochem.
Let $A$ be a matrix with nonnegative real entries. A nonnegative factorization of size $k$ is a representation of $A$ as a sum of $k$ nonnegative rank-one matrices. The space of all such factorizations is a bounded semialgebraic set, and we…
An $(n,k)$ sequence covering array is a set of permutations of $[n]$ such that each sequence of $k$ distinct elements of $[n]$ is a subsequence of at least one of the permutations. An $(n,k)$ sequence covering array is perfect if there is a…
We define a quantity $c_m(n,k)$ as a generalization of the notion of the composition of the positive integer $n$ into $k$ parts. We proceed to derive some known properties of this quantity. In particular, we relate two partial Bell…
A word $w$ is called rich if it contains $| w|+1$ palindromic factors, including the empty word. We say that a rich word $w$ can be extended in at least two ways if there are two distinct letters $x,y$ such that $wx,wy$ are rich. Let $R$…
We give lower bounds on the growth rate of Dejean words, i.e. minimally repetitive words, over a k-letter alphabet, for k=5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Put together with the known upper bounds, we estimate these growth rates with the precision of…
Given a finite word u, we define its palindromic length |u|_{pal} to be the least number n such that u=v_1v_2... v_n with each v_i a palindrome. We address the following open question: Does there exist an infinite non ultimately periodic…
A binary word is called $q$-decreasing, for $q>0$, if inside this word each of length-maximal (in the local sense) occurrences of a factor of the form $0^a1^b$, $a>0$, satisfies $q \cdot a > b$. We bijectively link $q$-decreasing words with…