Related papers: Words Avoiding Tangrams
We prove that every $n$-letter word over $k$-letter alphabet contains some word as a subsequence in at least $k^{n/4k(1+o(1))}$ many ways, and that this is sharp as $k\to\infty$. For fixed $k$, we show that the analogous number deviates…
A \emph{palindrome} is a word that reads the same forwards and backwards. A \emph{block palindrome factorization} (or \emph{BP-factorization}) is a factorization of a word into blocks that becomes palindrome if each identical block is…
Any finite word $w$ of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is reached, the word $w$ is called rich. The number of rich words of length $n$ over an alphabet of cardinality $q$ is denoted…
The recently confirmed Dejean's conjecture about the threshold between avoidable and unavoidable powers of words gave rise to interesting and challenging problems on the structure and growth of threshold words. Over any finite alphabet with…
In a simple pattern matching problem one has a pattern $w$ and a text $t$, which are words over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$. One may ask whether $w$ occurs in $t$, and if so, where? More generally, we may have a set $P$ of patterns and a set…
Thin spanning trees lie at the intersection of graph theory, approximation algorithms, and combinatorial optimization. They are central to the long-standing \emph{thin tree conjecture}, which asks whether every $k$-edge-connected graph…
In combinatorics on words, a word w over an alphabet Sigma is said to avoid a pattern p over an alphabet Delta if there is no factor x of w and no non-erasing morphism h from Delta^* to Sigma^* such that h(p) = x. Bell and Goh have recently…
A morphism h is unambiguous with respect to a word w if there is no other morphism g that maps w to the same image as h. In the present paper we study the question of whether, for any given word, there exists an unambiguous 1-uniform…
Free words are elements of a free monoid, generated over an alphabet via the binary operation of concatenation. Casually speaking, a free word is a finite string of letters. Henceforth, we simply refer to them as words. Motivated by recent…
We construct an infinite word $w$ over the $5$-letter alphabet such that for every factor $f$ of $w$ of length at least two, there exists a cyclic permutation of $f$ that is not a factor of $w$. In other words, $w$ does not contain a…
The set of all $ q $-ary strings that do not contain repeated substrings of length $ \leqslant\! 3 $ (i.e., that do not contain substrings of the form $ a a $, $ a b a b $, and $ a b c a b c $) constitutes a code correcting an arbitrary…
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
In 2017, Vesti proposed the problem of determining the repetition threshold for infinite rich words, i.e., for infinite words in which all factors of length $n$ contain $n$ distinct nonempty palindromic factors. In 2020, Currie, Mol, and…
A word on $q$ symbols is a sequence of letters from a fixed alphabet of size $q$. For an integer $k\ge 1$, we say that a word $w$ is $k$-universal if, given an arbitrary word of length $k$, one can obtain it by removing entries from $w$. It…
An \emph{$(n,k,t)$-graph} is a graph on $n$ vertices in which every set of $k$ vertices contains a clique on $t$ vertices. Tur\'an's Theorem, rephrased in terms of graph complements, states that the unique minimum $(n,k,2)$-graph is an…
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…
Given two finite words $u$ and $v$ of equal length, define the \emph{overlap gap between $u$ and $v$}, denoted $og(u,v)$, as the least integer $m$ for which there exist words $x$ and $x'$ of length $m$ such that $xu=vx'$ or $ux=x'v$.…
We extend the theory of minimal absent words to (rooted and unrooted) trees, having edges labeled by letters from an alphabet $\Sigma$ of cardinality $\sigma$. We show that the set $\text{MAW}(T)$ of minimal absent words of a rooted (resp.…
A string $S[1,n]$ is a power (or tandem repeat) of order $k$ and period $n/k$ if it can decomposed into $k$ consecutive equal-length blocks of letters. Powers and periods are fundamental to string processing, and algorithms for their…
Tandem duplication is the process of inserting a copy of a segment of DNA adjacent to the original position. Motivated by applications that store data in living organisms, Jain et al. (2017) proposed the study of codes that correct tandem…