Analytic Combinatorics of Lattice Paths with Forbidden Patterns: Asymptotic Aspects and Borges\u27s Theorem

In a companion article dedicated to the enumeration aspects, we showed how to obtain closed form formulas for the generating functions of walks, bridges, meanders, and excursions avoiding any fixed word (a pattern p). The autocorrelation polynomial of this forbidden pattern p (as introduced by Guibas and Odlyzko in 1981, in the context of regular expressions) plays a crucial role. In this article, we get the asymptotics of these walks. We also introduce a trivariate generating function (length, final altitude, number of occurrences of p), for which we derive a closed form. We prove that the number of occurrences of p is normally distributed: This is what Flajolet and Sedgewick call an instance of Borges\u27s theorem. We thus extend and refine the study by Banderier and Flajolet in 2002 on lattice paths, and we unify several dozens of articles which investigated patterns like peaks, valleys, humps, etc., in Dyck and Motzkin paths. Our approach relies on methods of analytic combinatorics, and on a matricial generalization of the kernel method. The situation is much more involved than in the Banderier-Flajolet work: forbidden patterns lead to a wider zoology of asymptotic behaviours, and we classify them according to the geometry of a Newton polygon associated with these constrained walks, and we analyse what are the universal phenomena common to all these models of lattice paths avoiding a pattern

Unambiguous Separators for Tropical Tree Automata

In this paper we show that given a max-plus automaton (over trees, and with real weights) computing a function f and a min-plus automaton (similar) computing a function g such that f ? g, there exists effectively an unambiguous tropical automaton computing h such that f ? h ? g. This generalizes a result of Lombardy and Mairesse of 2006 stating that series which are both max-plus and min-plus rational are unambiguous. This generalization goes in two directions: trees are considered instead of words, and separation is established instead of characterization (separation implies characterization). The techniques in the two proofs are very different

Phrase structure grammars as indicative of uniquely human thoughts

I argue that the ability to compute phrase structure grammars is indicative of a particular kind of thought. This type of thought that is only available to cognitive systems that have access to the computations that allow the generation and interpretation of the structural descriptions of phrase structure grammars. The study of phrase structure grammars, and formal language theory in general, is thus indispensable to studies of human cognition, for it makes explicit both the unique type of human thought and the underlying mechanisms in virtue of which this thought is made possible

On Lattice Paths with Marked Patterns: Generating Functions and Multivariate Gaussian Distribution

International audienc

Cyclic sieving, skew Macdonald polynomials and Schur positivity

When $\lambda$ is a partition, the specialized non-symmetric Macdonald polynomial $E_{\lambda}(x;q;0)$ is symmetric and related to a modified Hall--Littlewood polynomial. We show that whenever all parts of the integer partition $\lambda$ is a multiple of $n$, the underlying set of fillings exhibit the cyclic sieving phenomenon (CSP) under a cyclic shift of the columns. The corresponding CSP polynomial is given by $E_{\lambda}(x;q;0)$. In addition, we prove a refined cyclic sieving phenomenon where the content of the fillings is fixed. This refinement is closely related to an earlier result by B.~Rhoades. We also introduce a skew version of $E_{\lambda}(x;q;0)$. We show that these are symmetric and Schur-positive via a variant of the Robinson--Schenstedt--Knuth correspondence and we also describe crystal raising- and lowering operators for the underlying fillings. Moreover, we show that the skew specialized non-symmetric Macdonald polynomials are in some cases vertical-strip LLT polynomials. As a consequence, we get a combinatorial Schur expansion of a new family of LLT polynomials

Automata in SageMath---Combinatorics meet Theoretical Computer Science

The new finite state machine package in the mathematics software system SageMath is presented and illustrated by many examples. Several combinatorial problems, in particular digit problems, are introduced, modeled by automata and transducers and solved using SageMath. In particular, we compute the asymptotic Hamming weight of a non-adjacent-form-like digit expansion, which was not known before