(Don't) Mind the Gap

Abstract

Infinite sequences are of tremendous theoretical and practical importance, and in the Information Age sequences of 0s and 1s are of particular interest. Over the past century, the field of symbolic dynamics has developed to study sequences with entries from a finite set. In this paper we will show you an interesting method for constructing sequences, and then we'll show you a fun variant of the method. The we'll discuss what theoretical computer scientists and mathematicians call the "complexity" of a sequence. We conclude by showing a technique you can use to compute the complexity of a sequence, illustrating it on our concrete examples.