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arXiv · 1508.02074

Closed, Palindromic, Rich, Privileged, Trapezoidal, and Balanced Words in Automatic Sequences

Luke Schaeffer·Jeffrey Shallit
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Abstract

We prove that the property of being closed (resp., palindromic, rich, privileged trapezoidal, balanced) is expressible in first-order logic for automatic (and some related) sequences. It therefore follows that the characteristic function of those n for which an automatic sequence x has a closed (resp., palindromic, privileged, rich, trape- zoidal, balanced) factor of length n is automatic. For privileged words this requires a new characterization of the privileged property. We compute the corresponding characteristic functions for various famous sequences, such as the Thue-Morse sequence, the Rudin-Shapiro sequence, the ordinary paperfolding sequence, the period-doubling sequence, and the Fibonacci sequence. Finally, we also show that the function counting the total number of palindromic factors in a prefix of length n of a k-automatic sequence is not k-synchronized.

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Luke Schaeffer, Jeffrey Shallit. 2015-08-09. Closed, Palindromic, Rich, Privileged, Trapezoidal, and Balanced Words in Automatic Sequences. https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02074

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