English

Palindromic Subsequences in Finite Words

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2019-01-23 v1 Discrete Mathematics Combinatorics

Abstract

In 1999 Lyngs{\o} and Pedersen proposed a conjecture stating that every binary circular word of length nn with equal number of zeros and ones has an antipalindromic linear subsequence of length at least 23n\frac{2}{3}n. No progress over a trivial 12n\frac{1}{2}n bound has been achieved since then. We suggest a palindromic counterpart to this conjecture and provide a non-trivial infinite series of circular words which prove the upper bound of 23n\frac{2}{3}n for both conjectures at the same time. The construction also works for words over an alphabet of size kk and gives rise to a generalization of the conjecture by Lyngs{\o} and Pedersen. Moreover, we discuss some possible strengthenings and weakenings of the named conjectures. We also propose two similar conjectures for linear words and provide some evidences for them.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.07502,
  title  = {Palindromic Subsequences in Finite Words},
  author = {Clemens Müllner and Andrew Ryzhikov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.07502},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted to LATA 2019

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:18:52.926Z