Related papers: Excess Coverage Arrays and Levenshtein's Conjectur…

It was conjectured by \v{C}ern\'y in 1964, that a synchronizing DFA on $n$ states always has a shortest synchronizing word of length at most $(n-1)^2$, and he gave a sequence of DFAs for which this bound is reached. Until now a full…

We try to find all quadruples of positive integers $(m,a,b,c)$ with $a \geq b \geq c$ such that there exists a distinct covering system with minimum modulus $m$ and least common multiple of the moduli $2^a 3^b 5^c$. We obtain complete…

Increasingly, biologists are constructing evolutionary trees on large numbers of overlapping sets of taxa, and then combining them into a `supertree' that classifies all the taxa. In this paper, we ask how much coverage of the total set of…

We provide a simple injective proof that the number of 132-avoiding permutations with a unique longest increasing subsequence is at least as large as the number of 132-avoiding permutations without a unique longest increasing subsequence.

The VC-dimension of a family P of n-permutations is the largest integer k such that the set of restrictions of the permutations in P on some k-tuple of positions is the set of all k! permutation patterns. Let r_k(n) be the maximum size of a…

We study the supersaturation problems of oddtown and eventown. Given a family $\mathcal A$ of subsets of an $n$ element set, let $op(\mathcal A)$ denote the number of distinct pairs $A,B\in \mathcal A$ for which $|A \cap B|$ is odd. We show…

Preservers and additive spanners are sparse (hence cheap to store) subgraphs that preserve the distances between given pairs of nodes exactly or with some small additive error, respectively. Since real-world networks are prone to failures,…

A set $S$ of permutations is forcing if for any sequence $\{\Pi_i\}_{i \in \mathbb{N}}$ of permutations where the density $d(\pi,\Pi_i)$ converges to $\frac{1}{|\pi|!}$ for every permutation $\pi \in S$, it holds that $\{\Pi_i\}_{i \in…

What is the length of the shortest sequence $S$ of reals so that the set of consecutive $n$-words in $S$ form a covering code for permutations on $\{1,2, >..., n\}$ of radius $R$ ? (The distance between two $n$-words is the number of…

Let $S_n$ denote the set of permutations of $[n]:=\{1,\cdots, n\}$, and denote a permutation $\sigma\in S_n$ by $\sigma=\sigma_1\sigma_2\cdots \sigma_n$. For $l\ge2$ an integer, let $A^{(n)}_{l;k}\subset S_n$ denote the event that the set…

In the $(k,h)$-SetCover problem, we are given a collection $\mathcal{S}$ of sets over a universe $U$, and the goal is to distinguish between the case that $\mathcal{S}$ contains $k$ sets which cover $U$, from the case that at least $h$ sets…

Let $\mathcal{S}_n$ denote the set of permutations of $\{1,2,\dots,n\}$. The function $f(n,s)$ is defined to be the minimum size of a subset $S\subseteq \mathcal{S}_n$ with the property that for any $\rho\in \mathcal{S}_n$ there exists some…

An overpartition is a partition such that the first occurrence (equivalently, the last occurrence) of a number may be overlined. In this article, we investigate three contents of overpartitions. We first consider the $r$-chain minimal and…

The largest known reset thresholds for DFAs are equal to $(n-1)^2$, where $n$ is the number of states. This is conjectured to be the maximum possible. PFAs (with partial transition function) can have exponentially large reset thresholds.…

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…

Let $S_{\rm div}(n)$ denote the set of permutations $\pi$ of $n$ such that for each $1\leq j \leq n$ either $j \mid \pi(j)$ or $\pi(j) \mid j$. These permutations can also be viewed as vertex-disjoint directed cycle covers of the divisor…

We define a suffixient set for a text $T [1..n]$ to be a set $S$ of positions between 1 and $n$ such that, for any edge descending from a node $u$ to a node $v$ in the suffix tree of $T$, there is an element $s \in S$ such that $u$'s path…

An ordered matching of size $n$ is a graph on a linearly ordered vertex set $V$, $|V|=2n$, consisting of $n$ pairwise disjoint edges. There are three different ordered matchings of size two on $V=\{1,2,3,4\}$: an alignment…

Let $t\ge 1$ be a given integer. Let ${\cal F}$ be a family of subsets of $[m]=\{1,2,\ldots,m\}$. Assume that for every pair of disjoint sets $S,T\subset [m]$ with $|S|=|T|=k$, there do not exist $2t$ sets in ${\cal F}$ where $t$ subsets of…

The main focus of this thesis is a generalization of covering arrays, covering arrays on graphs. Two vectors v,w in Z_k^n are qualitatively independent if for all ordered pairs (a,b) in Z_k x Z_k there is a position i in the vectors where…