How far away must forced letters be so that squares are still avoidable?

Rosenfeld, Matthieu

doi:10.1090/mcom/3535

How far away must forced letters be so that squares are still avoidable?
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by Matthieu Rosenfeld HTML | PDF

Math. Comp. 89 (2020), 3057-3071 Request permission

Abstract:

We describe a new nonconstructive technique to show that squares are avoidable by an infinite word even if we force some letters from the alphabet to appear at certain occurrences. We show that as long as forced positions are at a distance at least 19 (resp., 3, resp., 2) from each other, then we can avoid squares over 3 letters (resp., 4 letters, resp., 6 or more letters). We can also deduce exponential lower bounds on the number of solutions. For our main theorem to be applicable, we need to check the existence of some languages and we explain how to verify that they exist with a computer. We hope that this technique could be applied to other avoidability questions where the good approach seems to be nonconstructive (e.g., the Thue-list coloring number of the infinite path).

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