The periodic-structure conjecture for most frequent subwords

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Let ww be a word, and write wmw^m for its mm-fold concatenation. A subword is most frequent if it maximizes the number of occurrences in wmw^m. Periodic-structure conjecture. There is a word vv such that, for every sufficiently large mm, some most frequent subword of wmw^m has the form

u⋅vr⋅u′,u \cdot v^r \cdot u',

where uu and u′u' have lengths bounded by ∣v∣|v|.

If true, this would reduce the asymptotic analysis of most frequent subwords in periodic words to powers of a fixed word, potentially yielding improved bounds for the subword-entropy constants. The claim is supported by examples and is presented as open.

References

Primary source

Wenjie Fang, “Maximal number of subword occurrences in a word”, arXiv:2406.02971 (2025).

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