A note on the perturbations of subshifts

Abstract

In this paper, we consider different classes of subshifts and study their perturbations obtained by forbidding sequences that contain a given word as a subword. We show that the perturbations of sofic shifts are sofic. Though not true for general coded systems, we provide sufficient conditions under which perturbations of synchronized systems remain synchronized. We investigate which systems remain conjugate under perturbation by a word from a coded system. We also explicitly calculate the drop in entropy under perturbation when the subshift is an $\mathcal{S}$-gap shift, and obtain its exponential decay as the length of the word increases. In the case of subshifts of finite type, we explore the drop in entropy under multi-word perturbations.