<i>m</i>-aperiodic words on three-letter alphabet

Abstract

The work is devoted to the study of sets of aperiodic words over a finite alphabet. The set of aperiodic words can be considered as a dictionary of some finite formal language. The existence of infinite words in two-letter or three-letter alphabets that do not contain subwords that are third powers or, respectively, squares of other words was first discovered more than a hundred years ago. S.I. Adyan in 2010 constructed an example of an infinite sequence of irreducible words, each of which is the beginning of the next and does not contain word squares in a two-letter alphabet. S.E. Arshon established the existence of an n-digit asymmetric repetition-free sequence for an alphabet of at least three letters. In the monograph by S.I. Ad- yan proved that in an alphabet of two symbols there exist infinite 3-aperiodic sequences. In the works of other authors, generalizations of aperiodicity were considered, when not only the powers of some subwords were excluded. In the monograph by A.Yu. Olshansky proved the infinity of the set of 6-aperiodic words in a two-letter alphabet and obtained an estimate for the number of such words of any given length. The au- thor previously considered the case of a three-letter alphabet only in the case of 6-aperiodic words. In this article, we prove the infinity of the set of m-aperiodic words in the three-letter alphabet at m≥4and obtain an estimate for the set of such words. The results can be applied when encoding information in space communications.