Preface

Adaptive learning of compressible strings

Suppose an oracle knows a string $S$ that is unknown to us and that we want to determine. The oracle can answer queries of the form "Is $s$ a substring of $S$?". In 1995, Skiena and Sundaram showed that, in the worst case, any algorithm needs to ask the oracle $\sigma n/4 -O(n)$ queries in order to be able to reconstruct the hidden string, where $\sigma$ is the size of the alphabet of $S$ and $n$ its length, and gave an algorithm that spends $(\sigma-1)n+O(\sigma \sqrt{n})$ queries to reconstruct $S$. The main contribution of our paper is to improve the above upper-bound in the context where the string is compressible. We first present a universal algorithm that, given a (computable) compre…