Related papers: Solution to a BCC 2022 problem

Finding an Approximate Longest Common Substring (ALCS) within a given set $S=\{s_1,s_2,\ldots,s_m\}$ of $m \ge 2$ strings is a key problem in computational biology, such as identifying related mutations across multiple genetic sequences. We…

This paper presents the following results on sets that are complete for NP. 1. If there is a problem in NP that requires exponential time at almost all lengths, then every many-one NP-complete set is complete under length-increasing…

Let $k$ and $\ell$ be positive integers. A cycle with two blocks $c(k,\ell)$ is an oriented cycle which consists of two internally (vertex) disjoint directed paths of lengths at least $k$ and $\ell$, respectively, from a vertex to another…

In the decades-old Pattern Matching with Edits problem, given a length-$n$ string $T$ (the text), a length-$m$ string $P$ (the pattern), and a positive integer $k$ (the threshold), the task is to list the $k$-error occurrences of $P$ in…

A $k$-configuration is a collection of $k$ distinct integers $x_1,\ldots,x_k$ together with their pairwise arithmetic means $\frac{x_i+x_j}{2}$ for $1 \leq i < j \leq k$. Building on recent work of Filmus, Hatami, Hosseini and Kelman on…

For a fixed graph $H$, what is the smallest number of colours $C$ such that there is a proper edge-colouring of the complete graph $K_n$ with $C$ colours containing no two vertex-disjoint colour-isomorphic copies, or repeats, of $H$? We…

We consider the problem of computing a shortest solid cover of an indeterminate string. An indeterminate string may contain non-solid symbols, each of which specifies a subset of the alphabet that could be present at the corresponding…

Twenty years ago Bondy and Vince conjectured that for any nonnegative integer $k$, except finitely many counterexamples, every graph with $k$ vertices of degree less than three contains two cycles whose lengths differ by one or two. The…

A family of subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ is called {\it intersecting} if any two of its sets intersect. A classical result in extremal combinatorics due to Erd\H{o}s, Ko, and Rado determines the maximum size of an intersecting family of…

In the $k$-mismatch problem, given a pattern and a text of length $n$ and $m$ respectively, we have to find if the text has a sub-string with a Hamming distance of at most $k$ from the pattern. This has been studied in the classical setting…

In the BCSS model of real number computations we prove a concrete and explicit semi-decidable language to be undecidable yet not reducible from (and thus strictly easier than) the real Halting Language. This solution to Post's Problem over…

A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] , \dots w[i_{|u|}]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq |w|$. A word $w$ is $k$-subsequence universal over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if every word…

The Collision problem is to decide whether a given list of numbers $(x_1,\ldots,x_n)\in[n]^n$ is $1$-to-$1$ or $2$-to-$1$ when promised one of them is the case. We show an $n^{\Omega(1)}$ randomised communication lower bound for the natural…

The picture-hanging puzzle, popularized by Demaine et al. (2014), asks for a way to wrap a wire around $n$ nails such that the picture hangs as long as fewer than $k$ nails are removed, but falls as soon as any $k$ are removed. Solutions…

Given a finite directed graph, a coloring of its edges turns the graph into a finite-state automaton. A k-synchronizing word of a deterministic automaton is a word in the alphabet of colors at its edges that maps the state set of the…

There are n travellers who have k bicycles and they wish to complete a journey in the shortest possible time. We investigate optimal solutions of this problem, showing they are characterized by a set of words in the Dyck language.…

Let $\mathbb{N}$ be the set of all nonnegative integers. For $S\subseteq \mathbb{N}$ and $n\in \mathbb{N}$, let $R_S(n)$ denote the number of solutions of the equation $n=s+s'$, $s, s'\in S$, $s<s'$. In this paper, we determine the…

We consider the problem of finding, given two documents of total length $n$, a longest string occurring as a substring of both documents. This problem, known as the Longest Common Substring (LCS) problem, has a classic $O(n)$-time solution…

A universal cycle, or u-cycle, for a given set of words is a circular word that contains each word from the set exactly once as a contiguous subword. The celebrated de Bruijn sequences are a particular case of such a u-cycle, where a set in…

Let $\mathcal T (n, k)$ be the set of the $k$-uniform supertrees with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, where $k\geq 3$, $n\geq 5$ and $m=\frac{n-1}{k-1}$. % Let $m$ be the number of the edges of the supertrees in $\mathcal T (n, k)$, where…