Related papers: Avoiding abelian powers cyclically

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…

In 1976, Dekking showed that there exists an infinite binary word that contains neither squares yy with y >= 4 nor cubes xxx. We show that `cube' can be replaced by any fractional power > 5/2. We also consider the analogous problem where…

Fici et al. defined a word to be a k-power if it is the concatenation of k consecutive identical blocks, and an r-antipower if it is the concatenation of r pairwise distinct blocks of the same size. They defined N (k, r) as the smallest l…

A {\em subsequence} of a word $w$ is a word $u$ that can be obtained by deleting some letters from $w$ while maintaining the relative order of the remaining letters, e.g., $\mathtt{lala}$ is a subsequence of $\mathtt{alfalfa}$. A word, over…

An abelian anti-power of order $k$ (or simply an abelian $k$-anti-power) is a concatenation of $k$ consecutive words of the same length having pairwise distinct Parikh vectors. This definition generalizes to the abelian setting the notion…

The abelian critical exponent of an infinite word $w$ is defined as the maximum ratio between the exponent and the period of an abelian power occurring in $w$. It was shown by Fici et al. that the set of finite abelian critical exponents of…

In this paper we introduce and study a family of complexity functions of infinite words indexed by $k \in \ints ^+ \cup {+\infty}.$ Let $k \in \ints ^+ \cup {+\infty}$ and $A$ be a finite non-empty set. Two finite words $u$ and $v$ in $A^*$…

Fici, Restivo, Silva, and Zamboni define a $\textit{$k$-anti-power}$ to be a concatenation of $k$ consecutive words that are pairwise distinct and have the same length. They ask for the maximum $k$ such that every aperiodic recurrent word…

Let $\mathcal{C}_n$ denote the set of words $w=w_1\cdots w_n$ on the alphabet of positive integers satisfying $w_{i+1}\leq w_i+1$ for $1 \leq i \leq n-1$ with $w_1=1$. The members of $\mathcal{C}_n$ are known as Catalan words and are…

We consider sets of factors that can be avoided in square-free words on two-generator free groups. The elements of the group are presented in terms of 0,1,2,3 such that 0 and 2 (resp.,1 and 3) are inverses of each other so that 02, 20, 13…

We consider avoiding squares and overlaps over the natural numbers, using a greedy algorithm that chooses the least possible integer at each step; the word generated is lexicographically least among all such infinite words. In the case of…

Fici and Saarela ([2]) conjectured that a binary word of length n contains at least $\lfloor n/4 \rfloor$ abelian squares. We slightly extend this conjecture and show that it holds in some special cases. In all other cases we have the…

In combinatorics of words, a concatenation of $k$ consecutive equal blocks is called a power of order $k$. In this paper we take a different point of view and define an anti-power of order $k$ as a concatenation of $k$ consecutive pairwise…

The complement $\overline{x}$ of a binary word $x$ is obtained by changing each $0$ in $x$ to $1$ and vice versa. We study infinite binary words $\bf w$ that avoid sufficiently large complementary factors; that is, if $x$ is a factor of…

In this paper we undertake the general study of the Abelian complexity of an infinite word on a finite alphabet. We investigate both similarities and differences between the Abelian complexity and the usual subword complexity. While the…

How long can a word be that avoids the unavoidable? Word $W$ encounters word $V$ provided there is a homomorphism $\phi$ defined by mapping letters to nonempty words such that $\phi(V)$ is a subword of $W$. Otherwise, $W$ is said to avoid…

Two $k$-ary Fibonacci recurrences are $a_k(n) = a_k(n-1) + k \cdot a_k(n-2)$ and $b_k(n) = k \cdot b_k(n-1) + b_k(n-2)$. We provide a simple proof that $a_k(n)$ is the number of $k$-regular words over $[n] = \{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ that avoid…

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…

We describe a new non-constructive technique to show that squares are avoidable by an infinite word even if we force some letters from the alphabet to appear at certain occurrences. We show that as long as forced positions are at distance…

A word $u$ defined over an alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ is $c$-balanced ($c\in\mathbb{N}$) if for all pairs of factors $v$, $w$ of $u$ of the same length and for all letters $a\in\mathcal{A}$, the difference between the number of letters $a$ in…