Abstract
We contribute to the study of the set of ternary square-free words. Under the prefix order, this set forms a tree, and we prove two results on its structure. First, we show that non-branching paths in this tree are short: such a path from a node of nth level has length \(O(\log n)\). Second, we prove that any infinite path in the tree has a lot of branching points: the lower density of the set of such points is at least 2/9.
E.A. Petrova and A.M. Shur—Supported by the grant 13-01-00852 of the Russian Foundation of Basic Research.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bean, D.A., Ehrenfeucht, A., McNulty, G.: Avoidable patterns in strings of symbols. Pac. J. Math. 85, 261–294 (1979)
Currie, J.D.: On the structure and extendibility of \(k\)-power free words. Eur. J. Comb. 16, 111–124 (1995)
Currie, J.D., Pierce, C.W.: The fixing block method in combinatorics on words. Combinatorica 23, 571–584 (2003)
Currie, J.D., Shelton, R.O.: The set of \(k\)-power free words over \(\sigma \) is empty or perfect. Eur. J. Comb. 24, 573–580 (2003)
Pansiot, J.J.: A propos d’une conjecture de F. Dejean sur les répétitions dans les mots. Discrete Appl. Math. 7, 297–311 (1984)
Petrova, E.A., Shur, A.M.: Constructing premaximal binary cube-free words of any level. Int. J. Found. Comp. Sci. 23(8), 1595–1609 (2012)
Petrova, E.A., Shur, A.M.: Constructing premaximal ternary square-free words of any level. In: Rovan, B., Sassone, V., Widmayer, P. (eds.) MFCS 2012. LNCS, vol. 7464, pp. 752–763. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Restivo, A., Salemi, S.: Some decision results on non-repetitive words. In: Apostolico, A., Galil, Z. (eds.) Combinatorial Algorithms on Words. NATO ASI Series, vol. 12, pp. 289–295. Springer, Heidelberg (1985)
Shelton, R.: Aperiodic words on three symbols. II. J. Reine Angew. Math. 327, 1–11 (1981)
Shelton, R.O., Soni, R.P.: Aperiodic words on three symbols. III. J. Reine Angew. Math. 330, 44–52 (1982)
Shur, A.M.: On ternary square-free circular words. Electron. J. Comb. 17, R140 (2010)
Shur, A.M.: Deciding context equivalence of binary overlap-free words in linear time. Semigroup Forum 84, 447–471 (2012)
Shur, A.M.: Growth properties of power-free languages. Comput. Sci. Rev. 6, 187–208 (2012)
Thue, A.: Über unendliche Zeichenreihen. Norske vid. Selsk. Skr. Mat. Nat. Kl. 7, 1–22 (1906)
Acknowledgement
We thank the anonymous referee for useful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Petrova, E.A., Shur, A.M. (2015). On the Tree of Ternary Square-Free Words. In: Manea, F., Nowotka, D. (eds) Combinatorics on Words. WORDS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9304. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23660-5_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23660-5_19
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23659-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23660-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)