Extremal Pattern-Avoiding Words

Abstract

Recently, Grytczuk, Kordulewski, and Niewiadomski defined an extremal word over an alphabet $\mathbb{A}$ to be a word with the property that inserting any letter from $\mathbb{A}$ at any position in the word yields a given pattern. In this paper, we determine the number of extremal $XY_1XY_2X\dots XY_tX$-avoiding words on a $k$-letter alphabet. We also derive a lower bound on the shortest possible length of an extremal square-free word on a $k$-letter alphabet that grows exponentially in $k$.