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Binary Patterns in Binary Cube-Free Words: Avoidability and Growth
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 rates of the avoiding languages are studied. All such languages, except
for the overlap-free language, are proved to have exponential growth. The exact
growth rates of languages avoiding minimal avoidable patterns are approximated
through computer-assisted upper bounds. Finally, a new example of a
pattern-avoiding language of polynomial growth is given.Comment: 18 pages, 2 tables; submitted to RAIRO TIA (Special issue of Mons
Days 2012
Avoidability of formulas with two variables
In combinatorics on words, a word over an alphabet is said to
avoid a pattern over an alphabet of variables if there is no
factor of such that where is a
non-erasing morphism. A pattern is said to be -avoidable if there exists
an infinite word over a -letter alphabet that avoids . We consider the
patterns such that at most two variables appear at least twice, or
equivalently, the formulas with at most two variables. For each such formula,
we determine whether it is -avoidable, and if it is -avoidable, we
determine whether it is avoided by exponentially many binary words
Avoidability index for binary patterns with reversal
For every pattern over the alphabet , we specify the
least such that is -avoidable.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figur
Tower-type bounds for unavoidable patterns in words
A word is said to contain the pattern if there is a way to substitute
a nonempty word for each letter in so that the resulting word is a subword
of . Bean, Ehrenfeucht and McNulty and, independently, Zimin characterised
the patterns which are unavoidable, in the sense that any sufficiently long
word over a fixed alphabet contains . Zimin's characterisation says that a
pattern is unavoidable if and only if it is contained in a Zimin word, where
the Zimin words are defined by and . We
study the quantitative aspects of this theorem, obtaining essentially tight
tower-type bounds for the function , the least integer such that any
word of length over an alphabet of size contains . When , the first non-trivial case, we determine up to a constant factor,
showing that .Comment: 17 page
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