Related papers: Variations on shuffle squares

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…

Two finite words $u$ and $v$ are called abelian equivalent if each letter occurs equally many times in both $u$ and $v$. The abelian closure $\mathcal{A}(\mathbf{x})$ of an infinite word $\mathbf{x}$ is the set of infinite words…

A word $\sigma=\sigma_1...\sigma_n$ over the alphabet $[k]=\{1,2,...,k\}$ is said to be {\em smooth} if there are no two adjacent letters with difference greater than 1. A word $\sigma$ is said to be {\em smooth cyclic} if it is a smooth…

Two finite words $u$ and $v$ are called Abelian equivalent if each letter occurs equally many times in both $u$ and $v$. The abelian closure $\mathcal{A}(\mathbf{x})$ of (the shift orbit closure of) an infinite word $\mathbf{x}$ is the set…

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…

In [2], while studying a relevant class of polyominoes that tile the plane by translation, i.e., double square polyominoes, the authors found that their boundary words, encoded by the Freeman chain coding on a four letters alphabet, have…

The literal and the initial literal shuffle have been introduced to model the behavior of two synchronized processes. However, it is not possible to describe the synchronization of multiple processes. Furthermore, both restricted forms of…

We consider partial words with a unique position starting a power. We show that over a $k$ letter alphabet, a partial word with a unique position starting a square can contain at most $k$ squares. This is in contrast to full words which can…

The combinatorics of squares in a word depends on how the equivalence of halves of the square is defined. We consider Abelian squares, parameterized squares, and order-preserving squares. The word $uv$ is an Abelian (parameterized,…

Given a countable set X (usually taken to be N or Z), an infinite permutation $\pi$ of X is a linear ordering $<_\pi$ of X. This paper investigates the combinatorial complexity of infinite permutations on N associated with the image of…

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…

A power is a word of the form $\underbrace{uu...u}_{k \; \text{times}}$, where $u$ is a word and $k$ is a positive integer and a square is a word of the form $uu$. Fraenkel and Simpson conjectured in 1998 that the number of distinct squares…

A flip-swap language is a set S of binary strings of length n such that $S \cup 0^n$ is closed under two operations (when applicable): (1) Flip the leftmost 1; and (2) Swap the leftmost 1 with the bit to its right. Flip-swap languages model…

We introduce the notion of unavoidable (complete) sets of word patterns, which is a refinement for that of words, and study certain numerical characteristics for unavoidable sets of patterns. In some cases we employ the graph of pattern…

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 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…

A square is a concatenation of two identical words, and a word $w$ is said to have a square $yy$ if $w$ can be written as $xyyz$ for some words $x$ and $z$. It is known that the ratio of the number of distinct squares in a word to its…

Fici and Saarela ([2]) conjectured that a binary word of length n contains at least $\lfloor n/4 \rfloor$ abelian squares. We slightly extend this conjecture and show that it holds in some special cases. In all other cases we have the…

A double occurrence word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ is a word in which each alphabet letter appears exactly twice. Such words arise naturally in the study of topology, graph theory, and combinatorics. Recently, double occurrence…

A universal word for a finite alphabet $A$ and some integer $n\geq 1$ is a word over $A$ such that every word in $A^n$ appears exactly once as a subword (cyclically or linearly). It is well-known and easy to prove that universal words exist…