Related papers: No extremal square-free words over large alphabets
A square-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 a square. Grytczuk et al. recently introduced the concept of extremal…
A word is \emph{square-free} if it does not contain non-empty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over $3$-letter alphabet. We consider a new type of square-free words. A…
A word is square-free if it does not contain nonempty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. It was proved recently [7] that among these words there are…
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…
We consider words $w$ over the alphabet $\Sigma=\{0,1,2\}$. It is shown that there are irreducibly square-free words of all lengths $n$ except 4,5,7 and 12. Such a word is square-free (i.e., it has no repetitions $uu$ as factors), but by…
In 2007, Grytczuk conjecture that for any sequence $(\ell_i)_{i\ge1}$ of alphabets of size $3$ there exists a square-free infinite word $w$ such that for all $i$, the $i$-th letter of $w$ belongs to $\ell_i$. The result of Thue of 1906…
A word is square-free if it does not contain a nonempty word of the form $XX$ as a factor. A famous 1906 result of Thue asserts that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. We study square-free words with…
A word w is rich if it has |w|+1 many distinct palindromic factors, including the empty word. A word is square-free if it does not have a factor uu, where u is a non-empty word. Pelantov\'a and Starosta (Discrete Math. 313 (2013)) proved…
Let $u \shuffle v$ denote the set of all shuffles of the words $u$ and $v$. It is shown that for each integer $n \geq 3$ there exists a square-free ternary word $u$ of length $n$ such that $u\shuffle u$ contains a square-free word. This…
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 $\beta$,…
A \emph{square} is a finite non-empty word consisting of two identical adjacent blocks. A word is \emph{square-free} if it does not contain a square as a factor. In any finite word one may delete the repeated block of a square, obtaining…
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…
Let $S$ be one of $\{aba,bcb\}$ and $\{aba, aca\}$, and let $w$ be an infinite square-free word over $\Sigma=\{a,b,c\}$ with no factor in $S$. Suppose that $f:\Sigma\rightarrow T^*$ is a non-erasing morphism. Word $f(w)$ is square-free if…
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 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…
We study words that barely avoid repetitions, for several senses of "barely". A squarefree (respectively, overlap-free, cubefree) word is irreducible if removing any one of its interior letters creates a square (respectively, overlap,…
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.
Finite alphabets of at least three letters permit the construction of square-free words of infinite length. We show that the entropy density is strictly positive and derive reasonable lower and upper bounds. Finally, we present an…
Circular words are cyclically ordered finite sequences of letters. We give a computer-free proof of the following result by Currie: square-free circular words over the ternary alphabet exist for all lengths $l$ except for 5, 7, 9, 10, 14,…
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…