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Related papers: Square-free extensions of words

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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.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2009-04-14 James Currie , Narad Rampersad

Improved upper and lower bounds on the number of square-free ternary words are obtained. The upper bound is based on the enumeration of square-free ternary words up to length 110. The lower bound is derived by constructing generalised…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Uwe Grimm

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 $\beta$,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-06-19 Lucas Mol , Narad Rampersad , Jeffrey Shallit

We consider words over a binary alphabet. A word $w$ is overlap-free if it does not have factors (blocks of consecutive letters) of the form $uvuvu$ for nonempty $u$. Let $M(w)$ denote the number of positions that are middle positions of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-08-11 Tero Harju

An efficient, when compared to exhaustive enumeration, algorithm for computing the number of square-free words of length $n$ over the alphabet $\{a, b, c\}$ is presented.

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Vladislav Makarov

A graph $G = (V, E)$ is word-representable, if there exists a word w over the alphabet V such that for letters ${x, y} \in V$ , $x$ and $y$ alternate in $w$ if and only if $xy \in E$. In this paper, we prove that any non-empty…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-01-29 Biswajit Das , Ramesh Hariharasubramanian

We answer a question of Harju: An infinite square-free ternary word with an $n$-stem factorization exists for any $n\ge 13$. We show that there are uniform ternary morphisms of length $k$ for every $k\ge 23$. This resolves almost completely…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2012-07-23 James D. Currie

In 2008, Kurosaki gave a new construction of a (bi-)infinite squarefree word over three letters. We show that in fact Kurosaki's word avoids 7/4+-powers, which, as shown by Dejean, is optimal over a 3-letter alphabet.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-08-12 Serina Camungol , Narad Rampersad

We prove that for any sequence of binary alphabets $\mathcal{A}_1,\mathcal{A}_2,\dots$, there exists a cube-free word $c_1c_2\dots$ so that $c_1\in\mathcal{A}_1,c_2\in\mathcal{A}_2,\dots$. In particular, for every $n$, there are at least…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-04 Vuong Bui , Matthieu Rosenfeld

A position $p$ in a word $w$ is critical if the minimal local period at $p$ is equal to the global period of $w$. According to the Critical Factorisation Theorem all words of length at least two have a critical point. We study the number…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-07-21 Tero Harju

Recently, Grytczuk, Kordulewski, and Niewiadomski defined an extremal word over an alphabet $\mathbb{A}$ to be a word with the property that inserting any letter from $\mathbb{A}$ at any position in the word yields a given pattern. In this…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-09-23 Natalya Ter-Saakov , Emily Zhang

We study a question of Harju from 2019 regarding the existence of infinite ternary square-free words whose subsequences modulo $p$ and $q$ are also square-free for relatively prime integers $p$ and $q$. Among such pairs $(p, q)$ with $p, q…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Thomas Delépine , Pascal Ochem , Matthieu Rosenfeld

We study the structure of the language of binary cube-free words. Namely, we are interested in the cube-free words that cannot be infinitely extended preserving cube-freeness. We show the existence of such words with arbitrarily long finite…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2011-08-19 Elena A. Petrova , Arseny M. Shur

We solve a problem of Petrova, finalizing the classification of letter patterns avoidable by ternary square-free words; we show that there is a ternary square-free word avoiding letter pattern $xyzxzyx$. In fact, we: (1) characterize all…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2016-03-11 James D. Currie

We review the recent progress in the investigation of powerfree words, with particular emphasis on binary cubefree and ternary squarefree words. Besides various bounds on the entropy, we provide bounds on letter frequencies and consider…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2008-11-14 Uwe Grimm , Manuela Heuer

In a recent paper, one of us posed three open problems concerning squarefree arithmetic progressions in infinite words. In this note we solve these problems and prove some additional results.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-01-21 James Currie , Tero Harju , Pascal Ochem , Narad Rampersad

We prove that every concatenation of $10$ or more binary squares contains an overlap. The bound $10$ is best possible. In contrast, over a ternary alphabet, there are infinitely long overlap-free words that consist of a concatenation of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Jeffrey Shallit

In this work we consider morphisms that preserve well-known non-repeating properties: squarefreeness, cubefreeness, overlap-freeness and weak squarefreeness. Up to the present moment only the morphisms preserving three out of four…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-05-04 Boris Zolotov

We start by considering binary words containing the minimum possible numbers of squares and antisquares (where an antisquare is a word of the form $x \overline{x}$), and we completely classify which possibilities can occur. We consider…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-04-22 Tim Ng , Pascal Ochem , Narad Rampersad , Jeffrey Shallit

We consider three aspects of avoiding large squares in infinite binary words. First, we construct an infinite binary word avoiding both cubes xxx and squares yy with |y| >= 4; our construction is somewhat simpler than the original…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Narad Rampersad , Jeffrey Shallit , Ming-wei Wang