Successor-bispecial strings with minimum Burrows--Wheeler transform runs

Abstract

We study successor-bispecial strings over an alphabet $\Sigma$ of size $\sigma$, a minimal-branching analogue of de Bruijn strings, and ask how few Burrows--Wheeler transform (BWT) runs are possible. In a de Bruijn string of order $k$, every $(k-1)$-gram has all $\sigma$ right-extensions; here, every $(k-1)$-gram has exactly two right-extensions, determined by a successor rule, which also forces two left-extensions. For order $3$, we construct an explicit family $B_\sigma^{(3)}$, for every $\sigma \geq 2$, whose cyclic BWT has $r_c = \sigma^2 + 2$ runs. A suitable terminated linearization has the same run count, $r = r_c = \sigma^2 + 2$, while the smallest suffixient set has size $\chi = 2\sigma^2 + 1$. The ratio $\chi/r = 2 - 3/(\sigma^2 + 2)$ nearly saturates the known bound $\chi/r \leq 2$, which we have previously shown to be asymptotically tight. Compared with our earlier general construction, this improves the gap from $O(1/\sigma)$ to $O(1/\sigma^2)$. We also show that the order-$3$ pattern appears as a blockwise two-row projection of normalized linear-feedback shift register (LFSR) de Bruijn sequences over $\mathbb F_q$, when primitive trinomials $x^3 - x + c$ exist. For higher orders, we prove a general lower bound $r_c \geq \sigma^{k-1} + 2$ for every $\sigma \geq 3$ in the exact-length regime and analyze the boundary-merged higher-order candidate using the last-to-first (LF) permutation: it fails for $k = 4$ and all $\sigma \geq 3$, while verified $k = 5$ instances for $\sigma \in {3,4}$ yield $\chi/r$ ratios exceeding $1.96$.