Theoretical and Practical Aspects Related to the Avoidability of Patterns in Words

Abstract

This thesis concerns repetitive structures in words. More precisely, it contributes to studying appearance and absence of such repetitions in words. In the first and major part of this thesis, we study avoidability of unary patterns with permutations. The second part of this thesis deals with modeling and solving several avoidability problems as constraint satisfaction problems, using the framework of MiniZinc. Solving avoidability problems like the one mentioned in the past paragraph required, the construction, via a computer program, of a very long word that does not contain any word that matches a given pattern. This gave us the idea of using SAT solvers. Representing the problem-based SAT solvers seemed to be a standardised, and usually very optimised approach to formulate and solve the well-known avoidability problems like avoidability of formulas with reversal and avoidability of patterns in the abelian sense too. The final part is concerned with a variation on a classical avoidance problem from combinatorics on words. Considering the concatenation of i different factors of the word w, pexp_i(w) is the supremum of powers that can be constructed by concatenation of such factors, and RTi(k) is then the infimum of pexp_i(w). Again, by checking infinite ternary words that satisfy some properties, we calculate the value RT_i(3) for even and odd values of i.