2-abelian complexity of the Thue-Morse sequence

Scientific conference (2012, December 14)

Let k be an integer. Two words u and v of the same length are k-abelian equivalent, if they have the same prefix (resp. suffix) of length k-1 and if, for all words x of length k, the numbers of ... [more ▼]

Let k be an integer. Two words u and v of the same length are k-abelian equivalent, if they have the same prefix (resp. suffix) of length k-1 and if, for all words x of length k, the numbers of occurrences of x in u and v are the same. This notion has received some recent interest, see the works of Karhumäki et al. The k-abelian complexity of an infinite word x maps an integer n to the number of k-abelian classes partitioning the set of factors of length n occurring in x. The Thue-Morse word is a well-known and extensively studied 2-automatic sequence. It is trivially abelian periodic and its (1)-abelian complexity takes only two values. The aim of this talk is to explain how to compute the 2-abelian complexity a(n) of the Thue-Morse word, showing in particular that it is unbounded. We conjecture that a(n) is 2-regular in the sense of Allouche and Shallit. This question can be related to a recent work of Madill and Rampersad where the (1)-abelian complexity of the paper folding word is shown to be 2-regular. We will also explain why the usual logical framework introduced by Büchi and popularized by Bruyère (indeed, automatic sequences can be characterized in an extension of the Presburger arithmetic) and the recent work of Charlier et al. about "automatic theorem-proving" of properties of automatic sequences cannot be applied to these questions related to abelian complexity. [less ▲]

Some properties of abelian return words (long abstract)

Conference (2012, September 11)

We investigate some properties of abelian return words as recently introduced by Puzynina and Zamboni. In particular, we obtain a characterization of Sturmian words with non-null intercept in terms of the ... [more ▼]

We investigate some properties of abelian return words as recently introduced by Puzynina and Zamboni. In particular, we obtain a characterization of Sturmian words with non-null intercept in terms of the finiteness of the set of abelian return words to all prefixes. We describe this set of abelian returns for the Fibonacci word but also for the 2-automatic Thue–Morse word. We also investigate the relationship existing between abelian complexity and finiteness of the set of abelian returns to all prefixes. We end this paper by considering the notion of abelian derived sequence. It turns out that, for the Thue–Morse word, the set of abelian derived sequences is infinite. [less ▲]

Coloring of the infinite grid

Poster (2012, May 23)

We present a method that links (r,a,b)-codes in the infinite grid and particular colorings of weighted cycles, called constant 2-labellings.

Syntactic complexity of ultimately periodic sets of integers

in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2011), 6638

We compute the cardinality of the syntactic monoid of the language 0^∗rep_b(mN) made of base b expansions of the multiples of the integer m. We also give lower bounds for the syntactic complexity of any ... [more ▼]

We compute the cardinality of the syntactic monoid of the language 0^∗rep_b(mN) made of base b expansions of the multiples of the integer m. We also give lower bounds for the syntactic complexity of any (ultimately) periodic set of integers written in base b. We apply our results to some well studied problem: decide whether or not a b-recognizable sets of integers is ultimately periodic. [less ▲]