Transition Property For Cube-Free Words

We study cube-free words over arbitrary non-unary finite alphabets and prove the following structural property: for every pair $(u,v)$ of $d$-ary cube-free words, if $u$ can be infinitely extended to the right and $v$ can be infinitely extended to the left respecting the cube-freeness property, then there exists a "transition" word $w$ over the same alphabet such that $uwv$ is cube free. The crucial case is the case of the binary alphabet, analyzed in the central part of the paper. The obtained "transition property", together with the developed technique, allowed us to solve cube-free versions of three old open problems by Restivo and Salemi. Besides, it has some further implications for combinatorics on words; e.g., it implies the existence of infinite cube-free words of very big subword (factor) complexity.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure

Branching densities of cube-free and square-free words

Binary cube-free language and ternary square-free language are two “canonical” represen-tatives of a wide class of languages defined by avoidance properties. Each of these two languages can be viewed as an infinite binary tree reflecting the prefix order of its elements. We study how “homogenious” these trees are, analysing the following parameter: the density of branching nodes along infinite paths. We present combinatorial results and an efficient search algorithm, which together allowed us to get the following numerical results for the cube-free language: the minimal density of branching points is between 3509/9120 ≈ 0.38476 and 13/29 ≈ 0.44828, and the maximal density is between 0.72 and 67/93 ≈ 0.72043. We also prove the lower bound 223/868 ≈ 0.25691 on the density of branching points in the tree of the ternary square-free language. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.This research was funded by Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (Ural Mathematical Center project No. 075-02-2020-1537/1)