Related papers: Words Avoiding Tangrams

We show that the number of length-n words over a k-letter alphabet having no even palindromic prefix is the same as the number of length-n unbordered words, by constructing an explicit bijection between the two sets. A slightly different…

For rational $1<r\leq 2$, an undirected $r$-power is a word of the form $xyx'$, where $x$ is nonempty, $x'\in\{x,x^\mathrm{R}\}$, and $|xyx'|/|xy|=r$. The undirected repetition threshold for $k$ letters, denoted $\mathrm{URT}(k)$, is the…

Ochem, Rampersad, and Shallit gave various examples of infinite words avoiding what they called approximate repetitions. An approximate repetition is a factor of the form xx', where x and x' are close to being identical. In their work, they…

A word~$w$ has a border $u$ if $u$ is a non-empty proper prefix and suffix of $u$. A word~$w$ is said to be \emph{closed} if $w$ is of length at most $1$ or if $w$ has a border that occurs exactly twice in $w$. A word~$w$ is said to be…

We show how to enumerate words in $1^{m_1} \dots n^{m_n}$ that avoid the increasing consecutive pattern $12 \dots r$ for any $r \geq 2$. Our approach yields an $O(n^{s+1})$ algorithm to enumerate words in $1^s \dots n^s$, avoiding the…

In this paper, we consider pattern avoidance in a subset of words on $\{1,1,2,2,\dots,n,n\}$ called reverse double lists. In particular a reverse double list is a word formed by concatenating a permutation with its reversal. We enumerate…

It is easy to find a right-angled triangle with integer sides whose area is 6. There is no such triangle with area 5, but there is one with rational sides (a `\emph{Pythagorean triangle}'). For historical reasons, integers such as 6 or 5…

We consider avoiding mesosomes -- that is, words of the form $xx'$ with $x'$ a conjugate of $x$ that is different from $x$ -- over a binary alphabet. We give a structure theorem for mesosome-avoiding words, count how many there are,…

A pattern $\alpha$ is a string of variables and terminal letters. We say that $\alpha$ matches a word $w$, consisting only of terminal letters, if $w$ can be obtained by replacing the variables of $\alpha$ by terminal words. The matching…

We show that there exists an infinite word over the alphabet {0, 1, 3, 4} containing no three consecutive blocks of the same size and the same sum. This answers an open problem of Pirillo and Varricchio from 1994.

A 1-11-representation of a graph $G(V,E)$ is a word over the alphabet $V$ such that two distinct vertices $x$ and $y$ are adjacent if and only if the restricted word $w{x,y}$ (obtained from $w$ by deleting all letters except $x$ and $y$)…

String matching is the problem of finding all the occurrences of a pattern in a text. We propose improved versions of the fast family of string matching algorithms based on hashing $q$-grams. The improvement consists of considering minimal…

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…

Let the root of the word $w$ be the smallest prefix $v$ of $w$ such that $w$ is a prefix of $vvv...$. $per(w)$ is the length of the root of $w$. For any $n\ge5$, an $n$-ary threshold word is a word $w$ such that for any factor (subword) $v$…

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…

It is known that there are infinite words over finite alphabets with Abelian repetition threshold arbitrarily close to 1; however, the construction previously used involves huge alphabets. In this note we give a short cyclic morphism…

We are interested in the maximal number of distinct squares in a word. This problem was introduced by Fraenkel and Simpson, who presented a bound of 2n for a word of length n, and conjectured that the bound was less than n. Being that the…

A closed word (a.k.a. periodic-like word or complete first return) is a word whose longest border does not have internal occurrences, or, equivalently, whose longest repeated prefix is not right special. We investigate the structure of…

Let $S$ be a string of length $n$. In this paper we introduce the notion of \emph{string attractor}: a subset of the string's positions $[1,n]$ such that every distinct substring of $S$ has an occurrence crossing one of the attractor's…

Improved upper and lower bounds on the number of square-free ternary words are obtained. The upper bound is based on the enumeration of square-free ternary words up to length 110. The lower bound is derived by constructing generalised…