Related papers: Long twins in random words
We study the average edit distance between two random strings. More precisely, we adapt a technique introduced by Lueker in the context of the average longest common subsequence of two random strings to improve the known upper bound on the…
A \emph{power} is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer; the power is also called a {\em $k$-power} and $k$ is its {\em exponent}. We prove that for any $k \ge 2$,…
Let $X=(X_i)_{i\ge 1}$ and $Y=(Y_i)_{i\ge 1}$ be two sequences of independent and identically distributed (iid) random variables taking their values, uniformly, in a common totally ordered finite alphabet. Let LCI$_n$ be the length of the…
It is known that binary words containing no $k$ consecutive 1s are enumerated by $k$-step Fibonacci numbers. In this note we discuss the expected value of a random bit in a random word of length $n$ having this property.
A finite deterministic (semi)automaton $\mathcal{A} =(Q,\Sigma,\delta)$ is $k$-compressible if there is some word $w\in \Sigma^+$ such that the image of its state set $Q$ under the natural action of $w$ is reduced by at least $k$ states.…
Motivated by a conjecture of Frid, Puzynina, and Zamboni, we investigate infinite words with the property that for infinitely many n, every length-n factor is a product of two palindromes. We show that every Sturmian word has this property,…
Tandem duplication is an evolutionary process whereby a segment of DNA is replicated and proximally inserted. The different configurations that can arise from this process give rise to some interesting combinatorial questions. Firstly, we…
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,…
A word is said to be \emph{bordered} if it contains a non-empty proper prefix that is also a suffix. We can naturally extend this definition to pairs of non-empty words. A pair of words $(u,v)$ is said to be \emph{mutually bordered} if…
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 characterize the squares occurring in infinite overlap-free binary words and construct various alpha power-free binary words containing infinitely many overlaps.
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…
A synchronizing word of a deterministic finite complete automaton is a word whose action maps every state to a single one. Finding a shortest or a short synchronizing word is a central computational problem in the theory of synchronizing…
A permutation $\sigma \in S_n$ is a $k$-superpattern (or $k$-universal) if it contains each $\tau \in S_k$ as a pattern. This notion of "superpatterns" can be generalized to words on smaller alphabets, and several questions about…
We call a pair of vertex-disjoint, induced subtrees of a rooted trees twins if they have the same counts of vertices by out-degrees. The likely maximum size of twins in a uniformly random, rooted Cayley tree of size $n\to\infty$ is studied.…
For a stationary stochastic process $\{X_n\}$ with values in some set $A$, a finite word $w \in A^K$ is called a memory word if the conditional probability of $X_0$ given the past is constant on the cylinder set defined by $X_{-K}^{-1}=w$.…
If w is a word in d>1 letters and G is a finite group, evaluation of w on a uniformly randomly chosen d-tuple in G gives a random variable with values in G, which may or may not be uniform. It is known that if G ranges over finite simple…
If $x$ is a non-empty string then the repetition $xx$ is called a tandem repeat. Similarly, a tandem in a two dimensional array $X$ is a configuration consisting of a same primitive block $W$ that touch each other with one side or corner.…
The subword complexity of a word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ is a function that assigns for each positive integer $n$, the number of distinct subwords of length $n$ in $w$. The subword complexity of a word is a good measure of…
The success of large language models (LLMs) has motivated formal theories of language generation and learning. We study the framework of \emph{language generation in the limit}, where an adversary enumerates strings from an unknown language…