An Unoriented Variation on de Bruijn Sequences

Abstract

For positive integers $k,n$, a de Bruijn sequence $B(k,n)$ is a finite sequence of elements drawn from $k$ characters whose subwords of length $n$ are exactly the $k^n$ words of length $n$ on $k$ characters. This paper introduces the unoriented de Bruijn sequence $uB(k,n)$, an analog to de Bruijn sequences, but for which the sequence is read both forwards and backwards to determine the set of subwords of length $n$. We show that nontrivial unoriented de Bruijn sequences of optimal length exist if and only if $k$ is two or odd and $n$ is less than or equal to 3. Unoriented de Bruijn sequences for any $k$, $n$ may be constructed from certain Eulerian paths in Eulerizations of unoriented de Bruijn graphs.