Related papers: Avoiding Square-Free Words on Free Groups
Our main theorem is that the word problem in the Artin group G = <a,b,c | aba=bab, ac=ca, {}_{n}(b,c) = {}_{n}(c,b) > for n >= 5 can be solved using a system R of length preserving rewrite rules that, together with free reduction, can be…
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…
A circular word, or a necklace, is an equivalence class under conjugation of a word. A fundamental question concerning regularities in standard words is bounding the number of distinct squares in a word of length $n$. The famous conjecture…
We characterize the formulas that are avoided by every $\alpha$-free word for some $\alpha>1$. We study the avoidability index of formulas whose fragments are of the form $XYX$. The largest avoidability index of an avoidable palindrome…
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 $R$…
A border u of a word w is a proper factor of w occurring both as a prefix and as a suffix. The maximal unbordered factor of w is the longest factor of w which does not have a border. Here an O(n log n)-time with high probability (or O(n log…
We study numerically and analytically the average length of reduced (primitive) words in so-called locally free and braid groups. We consider the situations when the letters in the initial words are drawn either without or with…
A (non-circular) de Bruijn sequence w of order n is a word such that every word of length n appears exactly once in w as a factor. In this paper, we generalize the concept to a multi-shift setting: a multi-shift de Bruijn sequence tau(m,n)…
This paper initiates the study of shortening universal cycles (u-cycles) and universal words (u-words) for permutations either by using incomparable elements, or by using non-deterministic symbols. The latter approach is similar in nature…
Viewing Dehn's algorithm as a rewriting system, we generalise to allow an alphabet containing letters which do not necessarily represent group elements. This extends the class of groups for which the algorithm solves the word problem to…
Let S be a finite set of words over an alphabet Sigma. The set S is said to be complete if every word w over the alphabet Sigma is a factor of some element of S*, i.e. w belongs to Fact(S*). Otherwise if S is not complete, we are interested…
We consider the language consisting of all words such that it is possible to obtain the empty word by iteratively deleting powers. It turns out that in the case of deleting squares in binary words this language is regular, and in the case…
We consider some questions about formal languages that arise when inverses of letters, words and languages are defined. The reduced representation of a language over the free monoid is its unique equivalent representation in the free group.…
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…
Let $\mathfrak A$ be an alphabet and $W$ be a set of words in the free monoid ${\mathfrak A}^*$. Let $S(W)$ denote the Rees quotient over the ideal of ${\mathfrak A}^*$ consisting of all words that are not subwords of words in $W$. A set of…
To any infinite word w over a finite alphabet A we can associate two infinite words min(w) and max(w) such that any prefix of min(w) (resp. max(w)) is the lexicographically smallest (resp. greatest) amongst the factors of w of the same…
We prove that a random word of length $n$ over a $k$-ary fixed alphabet contains, on expectation, $\Theta(\sqrt{n})$ distinct palindromic factors. We study this number of factors, $E(n,k)$, in detail, showing that the limit…
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…
The notion of Abelian complexity of infinite words was recently used by the three last authors to investigate various Abelian properties of words. In particular, using van der Waerden's theorem, they proved that if a word avoids Abelian…
Any finite word $w$ of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is reached, the word $w$ is called rich. The number of rich words of length $n$ over an alphabet of cardinality $q$ is denoted…