Related papers: Finite automata and pattern avoidance in words
We study the asymptotics and fine-scale behavior of quantitative combinatorial measures of infinite words and related dynamical and algebraic structures. We construct infinite recurrent words $w$ whose complexity functions $p_w(n)$ are…
Grammatical inference consists in learning a language or a grammar from data. In this paper, we consider a number of models for inferring a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) with 3 sorts of states, that must accept some words, and…
A word contains a \emph{half-flip} if it contains non-empty factors $uv$ and $vu$ where $|u|=|v|$. Fici reports a non-constructive proof of the existence of an infinite word over a finite alphabet avoiding half-flips and asks for the size…
In automata theory, while determinisation provides a standard route to solving many common problems in automata theory, some weak forms of nondeterminism can be dealt with in some problems without costly determinisation. For example, the…
To any infinite word w over a finite alphabet A we can associate two infinite words min(w) and max(w) such that any prefix of min(w) (resp. max(w)) is the lexicographically smallest (resp. greatest) amongst the factors of w of the same…
A \emph{tangram} is a word in which every letter occurs an even number of times. Such word can be cut into parts that can be arranged into two identical words. The minimum number of cuts needed is called the \emph{cut number} of a tangram.…
Grammatical inference consists in learning a formal grammar as a finite state machine or as a set of rewrite rules. In this paper, we are concerned with inferring Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA) that must accept some words, and…
Let A be an alphabet and W be a set of words in the free monoid A*. Let S(W) denote the Rees quotient over the ideal of A* consisting of all words that are not subwords of words in W. We call a set of words W finitely based if the monoid…
In this note we provide a (decidable) graph-structural characterisation of the infiniteness of $L(w_1, ..., w_k)$, where $L(w_1, ..., w_k) = \{w \in A^* | |w|_{w_1} = \cdots = |w|_{w_k}\}$ is the set of all words that contain the same…
We study the task, for a given language $L$, of enumerating the (generally infinite) sequence of its words, without repetitions, while bounding the delay between two consecutive words. To allow for delay bounds that do not depend on the…
Recently, Bill Chen, together with his disciples Alvin Dai and Robin Zhou, discovered, and very elegantly proved, an algebraic equation satisfied by the generating function enumerating 123-avoiding words with two occurrences of each of 1,…
Stankova and West showed that for any non-negative integer $s$ and any permutation $\gamma$ of $\{4,5,\dots,s+3\}$ there are as many permutations that avoid $231\gamma$ as there are that avoid $312\gamma$. We extend this result to the…
We consider two natural problems about nondeterministic finite automata. First, given such an automaton M of n states, and a length l, does M accept a word of length l? We show that the classic problem of triangle-free graph recognition…
We introduce operators $\mathsf{hare}$ and $\mathsf{tortoise}$, which act on words as natural generalizations of West's stack-sorting map. We show that the heuristically slower algorithm $\mathsf{tortoise}$ can sort words arbitrarily faster…
The classical pattern matching paradigm is that of seeking occurrences of one string - the pattern, in another - the text, where both strings are drawn from an alphabet set $\Sigma$. Assuming the text length is $n$ and the pattern length is…
Given a set $\Pi$ of permutation patterns of length at most $k$, we present an algorithm for building $S_{\le n}(\Pi)$, the set of permutations of length at most $n$ avoiding the patterns in $\Pi$, in time $O(|S_{\le n - 1}(\Pi)| \cdot k +…
The pattern avoidance problem seeks to construct a set $X\subset \mathbb{R}^d$ with large dimension that avoids a prescribed pattern. Examples of such patterns include three-term arithmetic progressions (solutions to $x_1 - 2x_2 + x_3 =…
In this text, we consider random permutations which can be written as free words in several independent random permutations: firstly, we fix a non trivial word $w$ in letters $g_1,g_1^{-1},..., g_k,g_k^{-1}$, secondly, for all $n$, we…
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…
A data word is a sequence of pairs of a letter from a finite alphabet and an element from an infinite set, where the latter can only be compared for equality. Safety one-way alternating automata with one register on infinite data words are…