Lengths of extremal square-free ternary words

Authors

  • Lucas Mol The University of Winnipeg
  • Narad Rampersad The University of Winnipeg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11575/cdm.v16i1.69831

Abstract

A square-free word $w$ over a fixed alphabet $\Sigma$ is extremal if every word obtained from $w$ by inserting a single letter from $\Sigma$ (at any position) contains a square. Grytczuk et al. recently introduced the concept of extremal square-free word and demonstrated that there are arbitrarily long extremal square-free ternary words. We find all lengths which admit an extremal square-free ternary word. In particular, we show that there is an extremal square-free ternary word of every sufficiently large length. We also solve the analogous problem for circular words.

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Published

2021-03-19

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Section

Articles