Related papers: Words with Repeated Letters in a Grid

A matrix is called totally positive if every minor of it is positive. Such matrices are well studied and have numerous applications in Mathematics and Computer Science. We study how many times the value of a minor can repeat in a totally…

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…

Distinct letters $x$ and $y$ alternate in a word $w$ if after deleting in $w$ all letters but the copies of $x$ and $y$ we either obtain a word of the form $xyxy\cdots$ (of even or odd length) or a word of the form $yxyx\cdots$ (of even or…

We extend results regarding a combinatorial model introduced by Black, Drellich, and Tymoczko (2017+) which generalizes the folding of the RNA molecule in biology. Consider a word on alphabet $\{A_1, \overline{A}_1, \ldots, A_m,…

Let $f_W(n)$ be the number of different factors of length $n$ appearing in $W$. A classical result of Morse and Hedlund, stated in 1938, asserts that an infinite word $W$ is ultimately periodic if and only if $f_W(n)\leq n$ for some $n\in…

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 $f$ of $w$ such that $f= (p)$ where $h: \Delta^*\to\Sigma^*$ is a non-erasing morphism. A pattern…

A squarefree word is a sequence $w$ of symbols such that there are no strings $x, y$, and $z$ for which $w=xyyz$. A nonrepetitive coloring of a graph is an edge coloring in which the sequence of colors along any open path is squarefree. We…

A graph $G = (V,E)$ is word-representable if there exists a word $w$ over the alphabet $V$ such that letters $x$ and $y$ alternate in $w$ if and only if $xy$ is an edge in $E$. Word-representable graphs are the subject of a long research…

A graph $G=(V,E)$ is word-representable if there exists a word $w$ over the alphabet $V$ such that letters $x$ and $y$ alternate in $w$ if and only if $(x,y)\in E$ for each $x\neq y$. The set of word-representable graphs generalizes several…

The set of all avoidable patterns in n or fewer letters can be avoided on an alphabet with 2(n+2) letters.

Let $w$ be a word in the free group of rank $n \in \mathbb{N}$ and let $\mathcal{V}(w)$ be the variety of groups defined by the law $w=1$. Define $\mathcal{V}(w^*)$ to be the class of all groups $G$ in which for any infinite subsets $X_1,…

A square is a word of the form $xx$ for a non-empty word $x$. Brlek and Li [Comb. Theory, 2025] proved that the number of distinct squares in a word $w$ of length $n$ is at most $n - \sigma$, where $\sigma$ is the number of letters used in…

Fici, Restivo, Silva, and Zamboni define a $\textit{$k$-anti-power}$ to be a concatenation of $k$ consecutive words that are pairwise distinct and have the same length. They ask for the maximum $k$ such that every aperiodic recurrent word…

The classical No-Three-In-Line problem seeks the maximum number of points that may be selected from an $n\times n$ grid while avoiding a collinear triple. The maximum is well known to be linear in $n$. Following a question of Erde, we seek…

We revisit a classical crossword filling puzzle which already appeared in Garey\&Jonhson's book. We are given a grid with $n$ vertical and horizontal slots and a dictionary with $m$ words and are asked to place words from the dictionary in…

In a typical regular expression (regex) crossword puzzle, you are given two nonempty lists $R_1,\ldots,R_m$ and $C_1,\ldots,C_n$ of regular expressions over some alphabet, and your goal is to fill in an $m\times n$ grid with letters from…

Fraenkel and Simpson showed that the number of distinct squares in a word of length n is bounded from above by 2n, since at most two distinct squares have their rightmost, or last, occurrence begin at each position. Improvements by Ilie to…

A {\em square} is a word of the form $uu$. In this paper we prove that for a given finite word $w$, the number of distinct square factors of $w$ is bounded by $|w|-|\Alphabet(w)|+1$, where $|w|$ denotes the length of $w$ and…

A pair of letters $x$ and $y$ are said to alternate in a word $w$ if, after removing all letters except for the copies of $x$ and $y$ from $w$, the resulting word is of the form $xyxy\ldots$ (of even or odd length) or $yxyx\ldots$ (of even…

This paper presents a combinatorial study of the power contamination problem, a dynamic variant of power domination modeled on grid graphs. We resolve a conjecture posed by Ainouche and Bouroubi (2021) by proving it is false and instead…