English
Related papers

Related papers: Cubefree binary words avoiding long squares

200 papers

A word is square-free if it does not contain any square (a word of the form $XX$), and is extremal square-free if it cannot be extended to a new square-free word by inserting a single letter at any position. Grytczuk, Kordulewski, and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-02-07 Letong Hong , Shengtong Zhang

Richomme asked the following question: what is the infimum of the real numbers $\alpha$ > 2 such that there exists an infinite word that avoids $\alpha$-powers but contains arbitrarily large squares beginning at every position? We resolve…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2009-04-14 James D. Currie , Narad Rampersad

The avoidability of binary patterns by binary cube-free words is investigated and the exact bound between unavoidable and avoidable patterns is found. All avoidable patterns are shown to be D0L-avoidable. For avoidable patterns, the growth…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-02-20 Robert Mercas , Pascal Ochem , Alexei V. Samsonov , Arseny M. Shur

A \emph{square} is a finite non-empty word consisting of two identical adjacent blocks. A word is \emph{square-free} if it does not contain a square as a factor. In any finite word one may delete the repeated block of a square, obtaining…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-11-26 Jarosław Grytczuk , Szymon Stankiewicz

Using a new approach based on automatic sequences, logic, and a decision procedure, we reprove some old theorems about circularly squarefree words and unbordered conjugates in a new and simpler way. Furthermore, we prove three new results…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-04-18 Trevor Clokie , Daniel Gabric , Jeffrey Shallit

An overlap-free (or $\beta$-free) word $w$ over a fixed alphabet $\Sigma$ is extremal if every word obtained from $w$ by inserting a single letter from $\Sigma$ at any position contains an overlap (or a factor of exponent at least $\beta$,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-06-19 Lucas Mol , Narad Rampersad , Jeffrey Shallit

A word is cubefree if it contains no non-empty subword of the form xxx. A morphism h : Sigma^* -> Sigma^* is k-uniform if h(a) has length k for all a in Sigma. A morphism is cubefree if it maps cubefree words to cubefree words. We show that…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2009-04-14 James Currie , Narad Rampersad

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Jui-Yi Kao , Narad Rampersad , Jeffrey Shallit , Manuel Silva

A word w is rich if it has |w|+1 many distinct palindromic factors, including the empty word. A word is square-free if it does not have a factor uu, where u is a non-empty word. Pelantov\'a and Starosta (Discrete Math. 313 (2013)) proved…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-03-04 Jetro Vesti

A square-free word $w$ over a fixed alphabet $\Sigma$ is extremal if every word obtained from $w$ by inserting a single letter from $\Sigma$ (at any position) contains a square. Grytczuk et al. recently introduced the concept of extremal…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-02-03 Lucas Mol , Narad Rampersad

Two finite words $u,v$ are 2-binomially equivalent if, for all words $x$ of length at most 2, the number of occurrences of $x$ as a (scattered) subword of $u$ is equal to the number of occurrences of $x$ in $v$. This notion is a refinement…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2013-10-18 M. Rao , M. Rigo , P. Salimov

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-07-16 Pascal Ochem , Théo Pierron

We study the avoidability of long $k$-abelian-squares and $k$-abelian-cubes on binary and ternary alphabets. For $k=1$, these are M\"akel\"a's questions. We show that one cannot avoid abelian-cubes of abelian period at least $2$ in infinite…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-07-10 Michaël Rao , Matthieu Rosenfeld

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,…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2010-10-26 Arseny M. Shur

We review the recent progress in the investigation of powerfree words, with particular emphasis on binary cubefree and ternary squarefree words. Besides various bounds on the entropy, we provide bounds on letter frequencies and consider…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2008-11-14 Uwe Grimm , Manuela Heuer

We introduce new avoidability problems for words by considering equivalence relations, k-abelian equivalences, which lie properly in between equality and commutative equality, i.e. abelian equality. For two k-abelian equivalent words the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-03-19 Mari Huova , Juhani Karhumäki

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Xiaoyu He , Logan Post

We completely characterize the words that can be avoided in infinite squarefree ternary words.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Narad Rampersad

It is known that the number of overlap-free binary words of length n grows polynomially, while the number of cubefree binary words grows exponentially. We show that the dividing line between polynomial and exponential growth is 7/3. More…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Juhani Karhumaki , Jeffrey Shallit

We study cube-free words over arbitrary non-unary finite alphabets and prove the following structural property: for every pair $(u,v)$ of $d$-ary cube-free words, if $u$ can be infinitely extended to the right and $v$ can be infinitely…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Elena A. Petrova , Arseny M. Shur