Rational complexity of binary sequences, F$\mathbb {Q}$SRs, and pseudo-ultrametric continued fractions in $\mathbb {R}$

Abstract

We introduce rational complexity, a new complexity measure for binary sequences. The sequence s ∈ Bω is considered as binary expansion of a real fraction $s \equiv {\sum }_{k\in \mathbb {N}}s_{k}2^{-k}\in [0,1] \subset \mathbb {R}$ s ≡ ∑ k ∈ ℕ s k 2 − k ∈ [ 0 , 1 ] ⊂ ℝ . We compute its continued fraction expansion (CFE) by the Binary CFE Algorithm, a bitwise approximation of s by binary search in the encoding space of partial denominators, obtaining rational approximations r of s with r → s. We introduce Feedback in$\mathbb {Q}$ ℚ Shift Registers (F$\mathbb {Q}$ ℚ SRs) as the analogue of Linear Feedback Shift Registers (LFSRs) for the linear complexity L, and Feedback with Carry Shift Registers (FCSRs) for the 2-adic complexity A. We show that there is a substantial subset of prefixes with “typical” linear and 2-adic complexities, around n/2, but low rational complexity. Thus the three complexities sort out different sequences as non-random.