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Waiting for ABRACADABRA. Occurrences of Words and Leading Numbers

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Imagine Math

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the readers to the concept of “leading number”, as proposed by J. H. Conway in the seventies of the last century. The leading number, associated to a word w, is a binary vector that describes some special aspects of the structure of w. We shall see that it conveys the essential information that is needed in the analysis of the time of occurrence of w in a random sequence of letters.

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Italia

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De Santis, E., Spizzichino, F. (2012). Waiting for ABRACADABRA. Occurrences of Words and Leading Numbers. In: Emmer, M. (eds) Imagine Math. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-2427-4_17

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