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The Coolest Way to Generate Binary Strings

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Abstract

Pick a binary string of length n and remove its first bit b. Now insert b after the first remaining 10, or insert \(\overline{b}\) at the end if there is no remaining 10. Do it again. And again. Keep going! Eventually, you will cycle through all 2n of the binary strings of length n. For example, are the binary strings of length n=4, where and . And if you only want strings with weight (number of 1s) between ℓ and u? Just insert b instead of \(\overline{b}\) when the result would have too many 1s or too few 1s. For example, are the strings with n=4, ℓ=0 and u=2. This generalizes ‘cool-lex’ order by Ruskey and Williams (The coolest way to generate combinations, Discrete Mathematics) and we present two applications of our ‘cooler’ order. First, we give a loopless algorithm for generating binary strings with any weight range in which successive strings have Levenshtein distance two. Second, we construct de Bruijn sequences for (i) ℓ=0 and any u (maximum specified weight), (ii) any ℓ and u=n (minimum specified weight), and (iii) odd u−ℓ (even size weight range). For example, all binary strings with n=6, ℓ=1, and u=4 appear once (cyclically) in . We also investigate the recursive structure of our order and show that it shares certain sublist properties with lexicographic order.

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Notes

  1. When consulting these various applications, it should be noted that they may use different modifications of cool-lex order including reflecting the order or strings, reversing the bits in each string, or complementing the bits in each string.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics and Statistics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

    Brett Stevens

  2. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Aaron Williams

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  1. Brett Stevens
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  2. Aaron Williams
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Correspondence to Aaron Williams.

Additional information

Research supported in part by the NSERC Accelerator and Discovery Programmes, and a basic research grant from ONR.

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Stevens, B., Williams, A. The Coolest Way to Generate Binary Strings. Theory Comput Syst 54, 551–577 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-013-9486-8

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