English

Jumbled Scattered Factors

Combinatorics 2025-06-05 v1 Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

In this work, we combine the research on (absent) scattered factors with the one of jumbled words. For instance, wolf\mathtt{wolf} is an absent scattered factor of cauliflower\mathtt{cauliflower} but since lfow\mathtt{lfow}, a jumbled (or abelian) version of wolf\mathtt{wolf}, is a scattered factor, wolf\mathtt{wolf} occurs as a jumbled scattered factor in cauliflower\mathtt{cauliflower}. A \emph{jumbled scattered factor} uu of a word ww is constructed by letters of ww with the only rule that the number of occurrences per letter in uu is smaller than or equal to the one in ww. We proceed to partition and characterise the set of jumbled scattered factors by the number of jumbled letters and use the latter as a measure. For this new class of words, we relate the folklore longest common subsequence (scattered factor) to the number of required jumbles. Further, we investigate the smallest possible number of jumbles alongside the jumbled scattered factor relation as well as Simon's congruence from the point of view of jumbled scattered factors and jumbled universality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.03814,
  title  = {Jumbled Scattered Factors},
  author = {Pamela Fleischmann and Annika Huch and Melf Kammholz and Tore Koß},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.03814},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:58:46.484Z