On the Complexity of Determining the Period of a String

  • Authors:
  • Artur Czumaj;Leszek Gasieniec

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • COM '00 Proceedings of the 11th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching
  • Year:
  • 2000
  • Periodicity in streams

    APPROX/RANDOM'10 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Approximation, and 14 the International conference on Randomization, and combinatorial optimization: algorithms and techniques

  • Periodicity and cyclic shifts via linear sketches

    APPROX'11/RANDOM'11 Proceedings of the 14th international workshop and 15th international conference on Approximation, randomization, and combinatorial optimization: algorithms and techniques

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Abstract

We study the complexity of a classical combinatorial problem of computing the period of a string. We investigate both the average- and the worst-case complexity of the problem. We deliver almost tight bounds for the average-case. We show that every algorithm computing the period must examine Ω(√m) symbols of an input string of length m. On the other hand we present an algorithm that computes the period by examining on average O (√m ċ log|Σ|m) symbols, where Σ ≥ 2 stands for the input alphabet. We also present a deterministic algorithm that computes the period of a string using m+O(m3/4) comparisons. This is the first algorithm that have the worstcase complexity m + o(m).