Closed, Palindromic, Rich, Privileged, Trapezoidal, and Balanced Words in Automatic Sequences

We prove that the property of being closed (resp., palindromic, rich, privileged trapezoidal, balanced) is expressible in first-order logic for automatic (and some related) sequences. It therefore follows that the characteristic function of those n for which an automatic sequence x has a closed (res...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schaeffer, Luke R., Shallit, Jeffrey
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: European Mathematical Information Service (EMIS) 2016
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/103037
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6823-3343
Description
Summary:We prove that the property of being closed (resp., palindromic, rich, privileged trapezoidal, balanced) is expressible in first-order logic for automatic (and some related) sequences. It therefore follows that the characteristic function of those n for which an automatic sequence x has a closed (resp., palindromic, privileged, rich, trapezoidal, balanced) factor of length n is itself automatic. For privileged words this requires a new characterization of the privileged property. We compute the corresponding characteristic functions for various famous sequences, such as the Thue-Morse sequence, the Rudin-Shapiro sequence, the ordinary paperfolding sequence, the period-doubling sequence, and the Fibonacci sequence. Finally, we also show that the function counting the total number of palindromic factors in the prefix of length n of a k-automatic sequence is not k-synchronized.