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Improved bounds on the number of ternary square-free words

2001/05/31 by Uwe Grimm
Mathematics · #math.CO

paper · pdf

published as Journal of Integer Sequences, Vol. 4 (2001), Ar ticle 01.2.7 · 17 pages, AMS LaTeX. Paper has been completely rewritten and comprises new results on both lower and upper bounds. The Mathematica program mentioned in the article can be downloaded at http://mcs.open.ac.uk/ugg2/wordcomb/brinkhuistriples.m

arxiv created 2001/08/02 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30

Abstract

Improved upper and lower bounds on the number of square-free ternary words are obtained. The upper bound is based on the enumeration of square-free ternary words up to length 110. The lower bound is derived by constructing generalised Brinkhuis triples. The problem of finding such triples can essentially be reduced to a combinatorial problem, which can efficiently be treated by computer. In particular, it is shown that the number of square-free ternary words of length n grows at least as 65^(n/40), replacing the previous best lower bound of 2^(n/17).

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