161 research outputs found
Extremal properties of (epi)Sturmian sequences and distribution modulo 1
Starting from a study of Y. Bugeaud and A. Dubickas (2005) on a question in
distribution of real numbers modulo 1 via combinatorics on words, we survey
some combinatorial properties of (epi)Sturmian sequences and distribution
modulo 1 in connection to their work. In particular we focus on extremal
properties of (epi)Sturmian sequences, some of which have been rediscovered
several times
Thue's 1914 paper: a translation
This paper includes notes to accompany a reading of Thue's 1914 paper
"Probleme uber Veranderungen von Zeichenreihen nach gegebenen Reglen", along
with a translation of that paper. Thue's 1914 paper is mainly famous for
proving an early example of an undecidable problem, cited prominently by Post.
However, Post's paper principally makes use of the definition of Thue systems,
described on the first two pages of Thue's paper, and does not depend on the
more specific results in the remainder of Thue's paper. A closer study of the
remaining parts of that paper highlight a number of important themes in the
history of computing: the transition from algebra to formal language theory,
the analysis of the "computational power" (in a pre-1936 sense) of rules, and
the development of algorithms to generate rule-sets
Varieties of Cost Functions.
Regular cost functions were introduced as a quantitative generalisation of regular languages, retaining many of their equivalent characterisations and decidability properties. For instance, stabilisation monoids play the same role for cost functions as monoids do for regular languages. The purpose of this article is to further extend this algebraic approach by generalising two results on regular languages to cost functions: Eilenberg's varieties theorem and profinite equational characterisations of lattices of regular languages. This opens interesting new perspectives, but the specificities of cost functions introduce difficulties that prevent these generalisations to be straightforward. In contrast, although syntactic algebras can be defined for formal power series over a commutative ring, no such notion is known for series over semirings and in particular over the tropical semiring
A new approach to nonrepetitive sequences
A sequence is nonrepetitive if it does not contain two adjacent identical
blocks. The remarkable construction of Thue asserts that 3 symbols are enough
to build an arbitrarily long nonrepetitive sequence. It is still not settled
whether the following extension holds: for every sequence of 3-element sets
there exists a nonrepetitive sequence with
. Applying the probabilistic method one can prove that this is true
for sufficiently large sets . We present an elementary proof that sets of
size 4 suffice (confirming the best known bound). The argument is a simple
counting with Catalan numbers involved. Our approach is inspired by a new
algorithmic proof of the Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma due to Moser and Tardos and its
interpretations by Fortnow and Tao. The presented method has further
applications to nonrepetitive games and nonrepetitive colorings of graphs.Comment: 5 pages, no figures.arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1103.381
Automata and rational expressions
This text is an extended version of the chapter 'Automata and rational
expressions' in the AutoMathA Handbook that will appear soon, published by the
European Science Foundation and edited by JeanEricPin
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