Related papers: Inside the Binary Reflected Gray Code: Flip-Swap L…
A prefix normal word is a binary word with the property that no substring has more $1$s than the prefix of the same length. By proving that the set of prefix normal words is a bubble language, we can exhaustively list all prefix normal…
Can a list of binary strings be ordered so that consecutive strings differ in a single bit? Can a list of permutations be ordered so that consecutive permutations differ by a swap? Can a list of non-crossing set partitions be ordered so…
When flipping a fair coin, let $W = L_1L_2...L_N$ with $L_i\in\{H,T\}$ be a binary word of length $N=2$ or $N=3$. In this paper, we establish second- and third-order linear recurrence relations and their generating functions to discuss the…
A Gray code is a listing structure for a set of combinatorial objects such that some consistent (usually minimal) change property is maintained throughout adjacent elements in the list. While Gray codes for m-ary strings have been…
A problem of reconstructing words from their subwords involves determining the minimum amount of information needed, such as multisets of scattered subwords of a specific length or the frequency of scattered subwords from a given set, in…
We show that the first-order logical theory of the binary overlap-free words (and, more generally, the ${\alpha}$-free words for rational ${\alpha}$, $2 < {\alpha} \leq 7/3$), is decidable. As a consequence, many results previously obtained…
Let $\textbf{T}(n,k)$ be the set of strings of length $n$ over the alphabet $\Sigma=\{1,2,\ldots,k\}$. A universal cycle for $\textbf{T}(n,k)$ can be constructed using a greedy algorithm: start with the string $k^n$, and continually append…
Each positive increasing integer sequence $\{a_n\}_{n\geq 0}$ can serve as a numeration system to represent each non-negative integer by means of suitable coefficient strings. We analyse the case of $k$-generalized Fibonacci sequences…
Given a string $P$ of length $m$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ of size $\sigma$, a swapped version of $P$ is a string derived from $P$ by a series of local swaps, i.e., swaps of adjacent symbols, such that each symbol can participate in at most…
Universal cycles are generalizations of de Bruijn cycles and Gray codes that were introduced originally by Chung, Diaconis, and Graham in 1992. They have been developed by many authors since, for various combinatorial objects such as…
Much research in stringology focuses on structures that can, in a way, ``grasp'' repeats (substrings that occur multiple times) as, for example, the so-called runs, a.k.a. maximal repetitions, compactly describe all tandem repeats. In this…
Ulam words are binary words defined recursively as follows: the length-$1$ Ulam words are $0$ and $1$, and a binary word of length $n$ is Ulam if and only if it is expressible uniquely as a concatenation of two shorter, distinct Ulam words.…
Unlabelled Necklaces are an equivalence class of cyclic words under both the rotation (cyclic shift) and the relabelling operations. The relabelling of a word is a bijective mapping from the alphabet to itself. The main result of the paper…
We investigate the existence of greedy Gray codes, based on the choice of the first element in the code, for two classes of binary words: generalized Fibonacci words and generalized Dyck words.
If the list of binary numbers is read by upward-sloping diagonals, the resulting ``sloping binary numbers'' 0, 11, 110, 101, 100, 1111, 1010, ... (or 0, 3, 6, 5, 4, 15, 10, ...) have some surprising properties. We give formulae for the n-th…
For a word $S$, let $f(S)$ be the largest integer $m$ such that there are two disjoints identical (scattered) subwords of length $m$. Let $f(n, \Sigma) = \min \{f(S): S \text{is of length} n, \text{over alphabet} \Sigma \}$. Here, it is…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…
We identify a subclass of the regular commutative languages that is closed under the iterated shuffle, or shuffle closure. In particular, it is regularity-preserving on this subclass. This subclass contains the commutative group languages…
We consider the following combinatorial question. Let $$ S_0 \subset S_1 \subset S_2 \subset ...\subset S_m $$ be nested sets, where #$(S_i) = i$. A move consists of altering one of the sets $S_i$, $1 \le i \le m-1$, in a manner so that the…
Circular splicing systems are a formal model of a generative mechanism of circular words, inspired by a recombinant behaviour of circular DNA. Some unanswered questions are related to the computational power of such systems, and finding a…