Related papers: Low complexity binary words avoiding $(5/2)^+$-pow…
It has been conjectured in 2011 by Brzozowski et al. that if $K$ and $L$ are factor-free regular languages over a binary alphabet having state complexity $m$ and $n$, resp, then the state complexity of $K\cup L$ is at most…
Let $n$ be a positive integer and $\mathcal M$ a set of rational $n \times n$-matrices such that $\mathcal M$ generates a finite multiplicative semigroup. We show that any matrix in the semigroup is a product of matrices in $\mathcal M$…
We consider binary rotation words generated by partitions of the unit circle to two intervals and give a precise formula for the number of such words of length n. We also give the precise asymptotics for it, which happens to be O(n^4). The…
In 2013, Fici and Zamboni proved a number of theorems about finite and infinite words having only a small number of factors that are palindromes. In this paper we rederive some of their results, and obtain some new ones, by a different…
Letting $w$ denote a finite, nonempty word, let $\text{red}(w)$ denote the word obtained from $w$ by replacing every subword $s$ of $w$ of the form $cc \cdots c$ for a given character $c$ (such that there is no character immediately to the…
In this document we achieve exact and asymptotic enumeration of words, compositions over a finite group, and/or integer compositions characterized by local restrictions and, separately, subsequence pattern avoidance. We also count…
We prove that a uniformly random automaton with $n$ states on a 2-letter alphabet has a synchronizing word of length $O(n^{1/2}\log n)$ with high probability (w.h.p.). That is to say, w.h.p. there exists a word $\omega$ of such length, and…
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…
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…
A word is square-free if it does not contain nonempty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. It was proved recently [7] that among these words there are…
Brlek et al. (2008) studied smooth infinite words and established some results on letter frequency, recurrence, reversal and complementation for 2-letter alphabets having same parity. In this paper, we explore smooth infinite words over…
In this paper, the construction of finite-length binary sequences whose nonlinear complexity is not less than half of the length is investigated. By characterizing the structure of the sequences, an algorithm is proposed to generate all…
We characterize exactly the lengths of binary circular words containing no squares other than 00, 11, and 0101. Key words: combinatorics on words, circular words, necklaces, square-free words, non-repetitive sequences
A prefix normal word is a binary word whose prefixes contain at least as many 1s as any of its factors of the same length. Introduced by Fici and Lipt\'ak in 2011 the notion of prefix normality is so far only defined for words over the…
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 prove results about subshifts with linear (word) complexity, meaning that $\limsup \frac{p(n)}{n} < \infty$, where for every $n$, $p(n)$ is the number of $n$-letter words appearing in sequences in the subshift. Denoting this limsup by…
In this paper we consider the following problems: how many different subsets of Sigma^n can occur as set of all length-n factors of a finite word? If a subset is representable, how long a word do we need to represent it? How many such…
A tangram is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Thus it can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The \emph{cut number} of a tangram is the minimum number of required cuts in this…
Two words $p$ and $q$ are avoided by the same number of length-$n$ words, for all $n$, precisely when $p$ and $q$ have the same set of border lengths. Previous proofs of this theorem use generating functions but do not provide an explicit…
A Lyndon word is a non-empty word strictly smaller in the lexicographic order than any of its suffixes, except itself and the empty word. In this paper, we show how Lyndon words can be used in the distributed control of a set of n weak…