Related papers: Another Way to Lower the Bound for Distinct Square…

Let $A(n,d)$ (respectively $A(n,d,w)$) be the maximum possible number of codewords in a binary code (respectively binary constant-weight $w$ code) of length $n$ and minimum Hamming distance at least $d$. By adding new linear constraints to…

Given a word $w$, what is the maximum possible number of appearances of $w$ reading contiguously along any of the directions in $\{-1, 0, 1\}^d \setminus \{\mathbf{0}\}$ in a large $d$-dimensional grid (as in a word search)? Patchell and…

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…

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 binary shuffle square is a binary word of even length that can be partitioned into two disjoint, identical subwords. Huang, Nam, Thaper, and the first author conjectured that as $n\rightarrow \infty$, asymptotically half of all binary…

We investigate the number of squares in a very broad family of binary recurrence sequences with $u_{0}=1$. We show that there are at most two distinct squares in such sequences (the best possible result), except under such very special…

Hardy and Littlewood conjectured that every large integer $n$ that is not a square is the sum of a prime and a square. They believed that the number $\mathcal{R}(n)$ of such representations for $n = p+m^2$ is asymptotically given by…

A word is "crucial" with respect to a given set of "prohibited words" (or simply "prohibitions") if it avoids the prohibitions but it cannot be extended to the right by any letter of its alphabet without creating a prohibition. A "minimal…

Fici and Saarela ([2]) conjectured that a binary word of length n contains at least $\lfloor n/4 \rfloor$ abelian squares. We slightly extend this conjecture and show that it holds in some special cases. In all other cases we have the…

We study words that barely avoid repetitions, for several senses of "barely". A squarefree (respectively, overlap-free, cubefree) word is irreducible if removing any one of its interior letters creates a square (respectively, overlap,…

It is known that $N(n)$, the maximum number of mutually orthogonal latin squares of order $n$, satisfies the lower bound $N(n) \ge n^{1/14.8}$ for large $n$. For $h\ge 2$, relatively little is known about the quantity $N(h^n)$, which…

Let $R(n)$ denote the number of rich words of length $n$ over a given finite alphabet. In 2017 it was proved that $\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty} \sqrt[n]{R(n)}=1$; it means the number of rich words has a subexponential growth. However, up to…

We show that for any two distinct words $ s_1, s_2 $ over an arbitrary alphabets, there exists a deterministic finite automaton with $ O(\log^2 n) $ states that accepts $ s_1 $ and rejects $ s_2 $. This improves the previous upper bound of…

We study the quantum query complexity of two problems. First, we consider the problem of determining if a sequence of parentheses is a properly balanced one (a Dyck word), with a depth of at most $k$. We call this the $Dyck_{k,n}$ problem.…

Circular words are cyclically ordered finite sequences of letters. We give a computer-free proof of the following result by Currie: square-free circular words over the ternary alphabet exist for all lengths $l$ except for 5, 7, 9, 10, 14,…

We prove an improvement on Schmidt's upper bound on the number of number fields of degree $n$ and absolute discriminant less than X for $6 \leq n \leq 94$. We carry this out by improving and applying a uniform bound on the number of monic…

The sum of square roots is as follows: Given $x_1,\dots,x_n \in \mathbb{Z}$ and $a_1,\dots,a_n \in \mathbb{N}$ decide whether $ E=\sum_{i=1}^n x_i \sqrt{a_i} \geq 0$. It is a prominent open problem (Problem 33 of the Open Problems Project),…

We study word reconstruction problems. Improving a previous result by P. Fleischmann, M. Lejeune, F. Manea, D. Nowotka and M. Rigo, we prove that, for any unknown word $w$ of length $n$ over an alphabet of cardinality $k$, $w$ can be…

For an undirected tree with $n$ edges labelled by single letters, we consider its substrings, which are labels of the simple paths between pairs of nodes. We prove that there are $O(n^{1.5})$ different palindromic substrings. This solves an…

For $n,d,w \in \mathbb{N}$, let $A(n,d,w)$ denote the maximum size of a binary code of word length $n$, minimum distance $d$ and constant weight $w$. Schrijver recently showed using semidefinite programming that $A(23,8,11)=1288$, and the…