An extension of the Lyndon–Schützenberger result to pseudoperiodic words

AbstractOne of the particularities of information encoded as DNA strands is that a string u contains basically the same information as its Watson–Crick complement, denoted here as θ(u). Thus, any expression consisting of repetitions of u and θ(u) can be considered in some sense periodic. In this paper, we give a generalization of Lyndon and Schützenberger’s classical result about equations of the form ul=vnwm, to cases where both sides involve repetitions of words as well as their complements. Our main results show that, for such extended equations, if l⩾5,n,m⩾3, then all three words involved can be expressed in terms of a common word t and its complement θ(t). Moreover, if l⩾5, then n=m=3 is an optimal bound. These results are established based on a complete characterization of all possible overlaps between two expressions that involve only some word u and its complement θ(u), which is also obtained in this paper

Avoiding and Enforcing Repetitive Structures in Words

The focus of this thesis is on the study of repetitive structures in words, a central topic in the area of combinatorics on words. The results presented in the thesis at hand are meant to extend and enrich the existing theory concerning the appearance and absence of such structures. In the first part we examine whether these structures necessarily appear in infinite words over a finite alphabet. The repetitive structures we are concerned with involve functional dependencies between the parts that are repeated. In particular, we study avoidability questions of patterns whose repetitive structure is disguised by the application of a permutation. This novel setting exhibits the surprising behaviour that avoidable patterns may become unavoidable in larger alphabets. The second and major part of this thesis deals with equations on words that enforce a certain repetitive structure involving involutions in their solution set. Czeizler et al. (2009) introduced a generalised version of the classical equations u` Æ vmwn that were studied by Lyndon and Schützenberger. We solve the last two remaining and most challenging cases and thereby complete the classification of these equations in terms of the repetitive structures appearing in the admitted solutions. In the final part we investigate the influence of the shuffle operation on words avoiding ordinary repetitions. We construct finite and infinite square-free words that can be shuffled with themselves in a way that preserves squarefreeness. We also show that the repetitive structure obtained by shuffling a word with itself is avoidable in infinite words

A structure theorem for streamed information

We identify the free half shuffle algebra of Schützenberger (1958) with an algebra of real-valued functionals on paths, where the half shuffle emulates integration of a functional against another. We then provide two, to our knowledge, new identities in arity 3 involving its commutator (area), and show that these are sufficient to recover the Zinbiel and Tortkara identities of Dzhumadil'daev (2007). We use these identities to prove that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be expressed as a polynomial over iterated areas. Moreover, we consider minimal sets of iterated integrals defined through the recursive application of the half shuffle on Hall trees. Leveraging the duality between this set of Hall integrals and classical Hall bases of the free Lie algebra, we prove using combinatorial arguments that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be written uniquely as a polynomial over Hall integrals. We interpret this result as a structure theorem for streamed information, loosely analogous to the unique prime factorisation of integers, allowing to split any real valued function on streamed data into two parts: a first that extracts and packages the streamed information into recursively defined atomic objects (Hall integrals), and a second that evaluates a polynomial function in these objects without further reference to the original stream. The question of whether a similar result holds if Hall integrals are replaced by Hall areas is left as an open conjecture. Finally, we construct a canonical, but to our knowledge, new decomposition of the free half shuffle algebra as shuffle power series in the greatest letter of the original alphabet with coefficients in a sub-algebra freely generated by a new alphabet with an infinite number of letters. We use this construction to provide a second proof of our structure theorem

A structure theorem for streamed information

We identify the free half shuffle algebra of Sch\"utzenberger (1958) with an algebra of real-valued functionals on paths, where the half shuffle emulates integration of a functional against another. We then provide two, to our knowledge, new identities in arity 3 involving its commutator (area), and show that these are sufficient to recover the Zinbiel and Tortkara identities of Dzhumadil'daev (2007). We use these identities to prove that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be expressed as a polynomial over iterated areas. Moreover, we consider minimal sets of iterated integrals defined through the recursive application of the half shuffle on Hall trees. Leveraging the duality between this set of Hall integrals and classical Hall bases of the free Lie algebra, we prove using combinatorial arguments that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be written uniquely as a polynomial over Hall integrals. We interpret this result as a structure theorem for streamed information, loosely analogous to the unique prime factorisation of integers, allowing to split any real valued function on streamed data into two parts: a first that extracts and packages the streamed information into recursively defined atomic objects (Hall integrals), and a second that evaluates a polynomial function in these objects without further reference to the original stream. The question of whether a similar result holds if Hall integrals are replaced by Hall areas is left as an open conjecture. Finally, we construct a canonical, but to our knowledge, new decomposition of the free half shuffle algebra as shuffle power series in the greatest letter of the original alphabet with coefficients in a sub-algebra freely generated by a new alphabet with an infinite number of letters. We use this construction to provide a second proof of our structure theorem

A structure theorem for streamed information

We identify the free half shuffle algebra of Schützenberger [31] with an algebra of real-valued functionals on paths, where the half shuffle emulates the integration of a functional against another. We then provide two, to our knowledge, new identities in arity 3 involving its commutator (area), and show that these are sufficient to recover the Zinbiel and Tortkara identities introduced by Dzhumadil'daev [11]. We then use these identities to provide a simple proof of the main result of Diehl et al. [8], namely that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be expressed as a polynomial over iterated areas. Moreover, we consider minimal sets of Hall iterated integrals defined through the recursive application of the half shuffle product to Hall trees. Leveraging the duality between this set of Hall integrals and classical Hall bases of the free Lie algebra, we prove using combinatorial arguments that any element of the free half shuffle algebra can be written uniquely as a polynomial over Hall integrals. We interpret this result as a structure theorem for streamed information, loosely analogous to the unique prime factorisation of integers, allowing to split any real valued function on streamed data into two parts: a first that extracts and packages the streamed information into recursively defined atomic objects (Hall integrals), and a second that evaluates a polynomial function in these objects without further reference to the original stream. The question of whether a similar result holds if Hall integrals are replaced by Hall areas is left as an open conjecture. Finally, we construct a canonical, but to our knowledge, new decomposition of the free half shuffle algebra as shuffle power series in the greatest letter of the original alphabet with coefficients in a sub-algebra freely generated by a new alphabet with an infinite number of letters. We use this construction to provide a second proof of our structure theorem

Deciding Conjugacy of a Rational Relation

A rational relation is conjugate if every pair of related words are conjugates. It is shown that checking whether a rational relation is conjugate is decidable. For this, we generalise the Lyndon-Sch\"utzenberger's theorem from word combinatorics. A consequence of the generalisation is that a set of pairs generated by a sumfree rational expression is conjugate if and only if there is a word witnessing the conjugacy of all the pairs

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

Hardness Results for Constant-Free Pattern Languages and Word Equations

We study constant-free versions of the inclusion problem of pattern languages and the satisfiability problem of word equations. The inclusion problem of pattern languages is known to be undecidable for both erasing and nonerasing pattern languages, but decidable for constant-free erasing pattern languages. We prove that it is undecidable for constant-free nonerasing pattern languages. The satisfiability problem of word equations is known to be in PSPACE and NP-hard. We prove that the nonperiodic satisfiability problem of constant-free word equations is NP-hard. Additionally, we prove a polynomial-time reduction from the satisfiability problem of word equations to the problem of deciding whether a given constant-free equation has a solution morphism ? such that ?(xy) ? ?(yx) for given variables x and y