Periodicity, repetitions, and orbits of an automatic sequence

  • Authors:
  • Jean-Paul Allouche;Narad Rampersad;Jeffrey Shallit

  • Affiliations:
  • CNRS, LRI, UMR 8623, Université Paris-Sud, Bâtiment 490, F-91405 Orsay Cedex, France;Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, MB R3B 2E9, Canada;School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We revisit a technique of S. Lehr on automata and use it to prove old and new results in a simple way. We give a very simple proof of the 1986 theorem of Honkala that it is decidable whether a given k-automatic sequence is ultimately periodic. We prove that it is decidable whether a given k-automatic sequence is overlap-free (or squarefree, or cubefree, etc.). We prove that the lexicographically least sequence in the orbit closure of a k-automatic sequence is k-automatic, and use this last result to show that several related quantities, such as the critical exponent, irrationality measure, and recurrence quotient for Sturmian words with slope @a, have automatic continued fraction expansions if @a does.