Related papers: Variations on shuffle squares

A binary word is symmetric if it is a palindrome or an antipalindrome. We define a new measure of asymmetry of a binary word equal to the minimal number of letters of the word whose deleting from the word yields a symmetric word and obtain…

We consider solutions of the word equation $X_1^2 \dotsm X_n^2 = (X_1 \dotsm X_n)^2$ such that the squares $X_i^2$ are minimal squares found in optimal squareful infinite words. We apply a method developed by the second author for studying…

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.…

Given a set I of word, the set of all words obtained by the shuffle of (copies of) words of I is naturally provided with a partial order. In [FS05], the authors have opened the problem of the characterization of the finite sets I such that…

A finite word $w$ is an abelian square if $w = xx^\prime$ with $x^\prime$ a permutation of $x$. In 1972, Entringer, Jackson, and Schatz proved that every binary word of length $k^2 + 6k$ contains an abelian square of length $\geq 2k$. We…

We prove that for a suitably nice class of random substitutions, their corresponding subshifts have automorphism groups that contain an infinite simple subgroup and a copy of the automorphism group of a full shift. Hence, they are…

Type A affine shuffles are compared with riffle shuffles followed by a cut. Although these probability measures on the symmetric group S_n are different, they both satisfy a convolution property. Strong evidence is given that when the…

In 1999 Lyngs{\o} and Pedersen proposed a conjecture stating that every binary circular word of length $n$ with equal number of zeros and ones has an antipalindromic linear subsequence of length at least $\frac{2}{3}n$. No progress over a…

A correlation is a binary vector that encodes all possible positions of overlaps of two words, where an overlap for an ordered pair of words (u,v) occurs if a suffix of word u matches a prefix of word v. As multiple pairs can have the same…

Words whose three successive factors of the same length are all different i.e. 3-anti-power words are a natural extension of square-free words (two successive factors of the same length are different). We give a way to verify whether a…

We investigate the problem of the maximum number of cubic subwords (of the form $www$) in a given word. We also consider square subwords (of the form $ww$). The problem of the maximum number of squares in a word is not well understood.…

Superpermutations are words over a finite alphabet containing every permutation as a factor. Finding the minimal length of a superpermutation is still an open problem. In this article, we introduce superpermutations matrices. We establish a…

It is known that semi-magic square matrices form a 2-graded algebra or superalgebra with the even and odd subspaces under centre-point reflection symmetry as the two components. We show that other symmetries which have been studied for…

We introduce and study a complexity function on words $c_x(n),$ called \emph{cyclic complexity}, which counts the number of conjugacy classes of factors of length $n$ of an infinite word $x.$ We extend the well-known Morse-Hedlund theorem…

We show that the shuffle $L \unicode{x29E2} F$ of a piecewise-testable language $L$ and a finite language $F$ is piecewise-testable. The proof relies on a classic but little-used automata-theoretic characterization of piecewise-testable…

Cyclic equalizability is a notion introduced by Shinagawa and Nuida in 2025, in the study of card-based cryptography. Informally, a collection of words is cyclically equalizable if, by inserting the same letters at the same positions in all…

The square $C^{*2}$ of a linear error correcting code $C$ is the linear code spanned by the component-wise products of every pair of (non-necessarily distinct) words in $C$. Squares of codes have gained attention for several applications…

We investigate the state size of DFAs accepting the shuffle of two words. We provide words u and v, such that the minimal DFA for u shuffled with v requires an exponential number of states. We also show some conditions for the words u and v…

We study the avoidability of long $k$-abelian-squares and $k$-abelian-cubes on binary and ternary alphabets. For $k=1$, these are M\"akel\"a's questions. We show that one cannot avoid abelian-cubes of abelian period at least $2$ in infinite…

An infinite permutation is a linear ordering of the set of natural numbers. An infinite permutation can be defined by a sequence of real numbers where only the order of elements is taken into account. In the paper we investigate a new class…