Related papers: Words Avoiding Tangrams

A palindrome is a string that reads the same forward and backward. A palindromic substring $w$ of a string $T$ is called a minimal unique palindromic substring (MUPS) of $T$ if $w$ occurs only once in $T$ and any proper palindromic…

A substring $u$ of a string $T$ is said to be a repeat if $u$ occurs at least twice in $T$. An occurrence $[i..j]$ of a repeat $u$ in $T$ is said to be a net occurrence if each of the substrings $aub = T[i-1..j+1]$, $au = T[i-1..j+1]$, and…

A permutation is said to be \emph{alternating} if it starts with rise and then descents and rises come in turn. In this paper we study the generating function for the number of alternating permutations on $n$ letters that avoid or contain…

Let T_k^m={\sigma \in S_k | \sigma_1=m}. We prove that the number of permutations which avoid all patterns in T_k^m equals (k-2)!(k-1)^{n+1-k} for k <= n. We then prove that for any \tau in T_k^1 (or any \tau in T_k^k), the number of…

String matching is one of the most fundamental problems in computer science. A natural problem is to determine the number of characters that need to be queried (i.e. the decision tree complexity) in a string in order to decide whether this…

This paper considers a problem that relates to the theories of covering arrays, permutation patterns, Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) classes, and probability thresholds. Specifically, we want to find the number of subsets of [n]:={1,2,....,n} we…

We call an integer a \emph{near-square} if its absolute value is a square or a prime times a square. We investigate such near-squares in the binary recurrence sequences defined for integers $a \geq 3$ by $u_{0}(a)=0$, $u_{1}(a)=1$ and…

For every $n\geq 27$, we show that the number of $n/(n-1)^+$-free words (i.e., threshold words) of length $k$ on $n$ letters grows exponentially in $k$. This settles all but finitely many cases of a conjecture of Ochem.

We consider a variation on a classical avoidance problem from combinatorics on words that has been introduced by Mousavi and Shallit at DLT 2013. Let $\texttt{pexp}_i(w)$ be the supremum of the exponent over the products of $i$ factors of…

A word is called $\beta$-free if it has no factors of exponent greater than or equal to $\beta$. The repetition threshold $\mathrm{RT}(k)$ is the infimum of the set of all $\beta$ such that there are arbitrarily long $k$-ary $\beta$-free…

Let $\mathcal{A}$ be a sequence of $rk$ terms which is made up of $k$ distinct integers each appearing exactly $r$ times in $\mathcal{A}$. The sum of all terms of a subsequence of $\mathcal{A}$ is called a subsequence sum of $\mathcal{A}$.…

A word $u$ is a subsequence of another word $w$ if $u$ can be obtained from $w$ by deleting some of its letters. The word $w$ with alph$(w)=\Sigma$ is called $k$-subsequence universal if the set of subsequences of length $k$ of $w$ contains…

We show that every Sturmian word has the property that the distance between consecutive ending positions of cubes occurring in the word is always bounded by $10$ and this bound is optimal, extending a result of Rampersad, who proved that…

Two words are $k$-binomially equivalent whenever they share the same subwords, i.e., subsequences, of length at most $k$ with the same multiplicities. This is a refinement of both abelian equivalence and the Simon congruence. The…

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

Given a permutation w, we show that the number of repeated letters in a reduced decomposition of w is always less than or equal to the number of 321- and 3412-patterns appearing in w. Moreover, we prove bijectively that the two quantities…

Carpi constructed an infinite word over a 4-letter alphabet that avoids squares in all subsequences indexed by arithmetic progressions of odd difference. We show a connection between Carpi's construction and the paperfolding words. We…

The notion of \emph{string attractor} has recently been introduced in [Prezza, 2017] and studied in [Kempa and Prezza, 2018] to provide a unifying framework for known dictionary-based compressors. A string attractor for a word…

Let $A$ be a finite or countable alphabet and let $\theta$ be literal (anti)morphism onto $A^*$ (by definition, such a correspondence is determinated by a permutation of the alphabet). This paper deals with sets which are invariant under…

Shallit and Wang studied deterministic automatic complexity of words. They showed that the automatic Hausdorff dimension $I(\mathbf t)$ of the infinite Thue word satisfies $1/3\le I(\mathbf t)\le 2/3$. We improve that result by showing that…