License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2016.124
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-62599
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2016/6259/
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Fici, Gabriele ; Restivo, Antonio ; Silva, Manuel ; Zamboni, Luca Q.

Anti-Powers in Infinite Words

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LIPIcs-ICALP-2016-124.pdf (0.6 MB)

Abstract

In combinatorics of words, a concatenation of k consecutive equal blocks is called a power of order k. In this paper we take a different point of view and define an anti-power of order k as a concatenation of k consecutive pairwise distinct blocks of the same length. As a main result, we show that every infinite word contains powers of any order or anti-powers of any order. That is, the existence of powers or anti-powers is an unavoidable regularity. Indeed, we prove a stronger result, which relates the density of anti-powers to the existence of a factor that occurs with arbitrary exponent. From these results, we derive that at every position of an aperiodic uniformly recurrent word start anti-powers of any order. We further show that any infinite word avoiding anti-powers of order 3 is ultimately periodic, and that there exist aperiodic words avoiding anti-powers of order 4. We also show that there exist aperiodic recurrent words avoiding anti-powers of order 6, and leave open the question whether there exist aperiodic recurrent words avoiding anti-powers of order k for k=4,5.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{fici_et_al:LIPIcs:2016:6259,
  author =	{Gabriele Fici and Antonio Restivo and Manuel Silva and Luca Q. Zamboni},
  title =	{{Anti-Powers in Infinite Words}},
  booktitle =	{43rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2016)},
  pages =	{124:1--124:9},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-013-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2016},
  volume =	{55},
  editor =	{Ioannis Chatzigiannakis and Michael Mitzenmacher and Yuval Rabani and Davide Sangiorgi},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2016/6259},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-62599},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2016.124},
  annote =	{Keywords: infinite word, anti-power, unavoidable regularity, avoidability}
}

Keywords: infinite word, anti-power, unavoidable regularity, avoidability
Collection: 43rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2016)
Issue Date: 2016
Date of publication: 23.08.2016

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