Search results for "Anti-power"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Algorithms for Anti-Powers in Strings
2018
Abstract A string S [ 1 , n ] is a power (or tandem repeat) of order k and period n / k if it can be decomposed into k consecutive equal-length blocks of letters. Powers and periods are fundamental to string processing, and algorithms for their efficient computation have wide application and are heavily studied. Recently, Fici et al. (Proc. ICALP 2016) defined an anti-power of order k to be a string composed of k pairwise-distinct blocks of the same length ( n / k , called anti-period). Anti-powers are a natural converse to powers, and are objects of combinatorial interest in their own right. In this paper we initiate the algorithmic study of anti-powers. Given a string S, we describe an op…
Anti-powers in infinite words
2018
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. As a consequence, we show that in every aperiodic uniformly recurrent word, anti-powers of ev…