Unavoidable Sets of Partial Words

The notion of an unavoidable set of words appears frequently in the fields of mathematics and theoretical computer science, in particular with its connection to the study of combinatorics on words. The theory of unavoidable sets has seen extensive study over the past twenty years. In this paper we extend the definition of unavoidable sets of words to unavoidable sets of partial words. Partial words, or finite sequences that may contain a number of ?do not know? symbols or ?holes,? appear naturally in several areas of current interest such as molecular biology, data communication, and DNA computing. We demonstrate the utility of the notion of unavoidability of sets of partial words by making use of it to identify several new classes of unavoidable sets of full words. Along the way we begin work on classifying the unavoidable sets of partial words of small cardinality. We pose a conjecture, and show that affirmative proof of this conjecture gives a sufficient condition for classifying all the unavoidable sets of partial words of size two. We give a result which makes the conjecture easy to verify for a significant number of cases. We characterize many forms of unavoidable sets of partial words of size three over a binary alphabet, and completely characterize such sets over a ternary alphabet. Finally, we extend our results to unavoidable sets of partial words of size k over a k-letter alphabet

Liouville property, Wiener's test and unavoidable sets for Hunt processes

Let $(X,\mathcal W)$ be a balayage space, $1\in \mathcal W$, or - equivalently - let $\mathcal W$ be the set of excessive functions of a Hunt process on a locally compact space $X$ with countable base such that $\mathcal W$ separates points, every function in $\mathcal W$ is the supremum of its continuous minorants and there exist strictly positive continuous $u,v\in \mathcal W$ such that $u/v\to 0$ at infinity. We suppose that there is a Green function $G>0$ for $X$, a metric $\rho$ on $X$ and a decreasing function $g\colon[0,\infty)\to (0,\infty]$ having the doubling property such that $G\approx g\circ\rho$. Assuming that the constant function $1$ is harmonic and balls are relatively compact, is is shown that every positive harmonic function is constant (Liouville property) and that Wiener's test at infinity shows, if a given set $A$ in $X$ is unavoidable, that is, if the process hits $A$ with probability one, wherever it starts. An application yields that locally finite unions of pairwise disjoint balls $B(z,r_z)$, $z\in Z$, which have a certain separation property with respect to a suitable measure $\lambda$ on $X$ are unavoidable if and only if, for some/any point $x_0\in X$, the series $\sum_{z\in Z} g(\rho(x_0,z))/g(r_z)$ diverges. The results generalize and, exploiting a zero-one law for hitting probabilities, simplify recent work by S. Gardiner and M. Ghergu, A. Mimica and Z. Vondra\v cek, and the author

Unavoidable induced subgraphs in large graphs with no homogeneous sets

A homogeneous set of an $n$-vertex graph is a set $X$ of vertices ($2\le |X|\le n-1$) such that every vertex not in $X$ is either complete or anticomplete to $X$. A graph is called prime if it has no homogeneous set. A chain of length $t$ is a sequence of $t+1$ vertices such that for every vertex in the sequence except the first one, its immediate predecessor is its unique neighbor or its unique non-neighbor among all of its predecessors. We prove that for all $n$, there exists $N$ such that every prime graph with at least $N$ vertices contains one of the following graphs or their complements as an induced subgraph: (1) the graph obtained from $K_{1,n}$ by subdividing every edge once, (2) the line graph of $K_{2,n}$, (3) the line graph of the graph in (1), (4) the half-graph of height $n$, (5) a prime graph induced by a chain of length $n$, (6) two particular graphs obtained from the half-graph of height $n$ by making one side a clique and adding one vertex.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Number of Holes in Unavoidable Sets of Partial Words I

Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain some undefined positions called holes. We consider unavoidable sets of partial words of equal length. We compute the minimum number of holes in sets of size three over a binary alphabet (summed over all partial words in the sets). We also construct all sets that achieve this minimum. This is a step towards the difficult problem of fully characterizing all unavoidable sets of partial words of size three

Number of Holes in Unavoidable Sets of Partial Words II

We are concerned with the complexity of deciding the avoidability of sets of partial words over an arbitrary alphabet. Towards this, we investigate the minimum size of unavoidable sets of partial words with a fixed number of holes. Additionally, we analyze the complexity of variations on the decision problem when placing restrictions on the number of holes and length of the words