Greetings to all. I am writing today to share a personal story / exploration using Maple of an algorithm from the history of combinatorics. The problem here is to count the number of strings over a certain alphabet which consist of some number of letters and avoid a set of patterns (these patterns are strings as opposed to regular expressions.) This counting operation is carried out using rational generating functions that encode the number of admissible strings of length n in the coefficients of their series expansions. The modern approach to this problem uses the Goulden-Jackson method which is discussed, including a landmark Maple implementation from a paper by D. Zeilberger and J. Noonan, at the following link at math.stackexchange.com (Goulden-Jackson has its own website, all the remaining software described in the following discussion is available at the MSE link.) The motivation for this work was a question at the MSE link about the number of strings over a two-letter alphabet that avoid the pattern ABBA.

As far as I know before Goulden-Jackson was invented there was the DFA-Method (Deterministic Finite Automaton also known as FSM, Finite State Machine.) My goal in this contribution was to study and implement this algorithm in order to gain insight about its features and how it influenced its powerful successor. It goes as follows for the case of a single pattern string: compute a DFA whose states represent the longest prefix of the pattern seen at the current position in the string as it is being scanned by the DFA, with the state for the complete pattern doubling as a final absorbing state, since the pattern has been seen. Translate the transitions of the DFA into a system of equations in the generating functions representing strings ending with a given maximal prefix of the pattern, very much like Markov chains. Finally solve the system of equations for the generating functions and thus obtain the sequence of values of strings of length n over the given alphabet that avoid the given pattern.

I have also implemented the DFA method for sets of patterns as opposed to just one pattern. The algorithm is the same except that the DFA does not consist of a chain with backlinks as in the case of a single pattern but a tree of prefixes with backlinks to nodes higher up in the tree. The nodes in the tree represent all prefixes that need to be tracked where obviously a common prefix between two or more patterns is shared i.e. only represented once. The DFA transitions emanating from nodes that are leaves represent absorbing states indicating that one of the patterns has been seen. We run this algorithm once it has been verified that the set of patterns does not contain pairs of patterns where one pattern is contained in another, which causes the longer pattern to be eliminated at the start. (Obviously if the shorter pattern is forbidden the so is the longer.) The number of states of the DFA here is bounded above by the sum of the lengths of the patterns with subpatterns eliminated. The uniqueness property of shared common prefixes holds for subtrees of the main tree i.e. recursively. (The DFA method also copes easily with patterns that have to occur in a certain order.)

I believe the Maple code that I provide here showcases many useful tricks and techniques and can help the reader advance in their Maple studies, which is why I am alerting you to the web link at MSE. I have deliberately aimed to keep it compatible with older versions of Maple as many of these are still in use in various places. The algorithm really showcases the power of Maple in combinatorics computing and exploits many different aspects of the software from the solution of systems of equations in rational generating functions to the implementation of data structures from computer science like trees. Did you know that Maple permits nested procedures as known to those who have met Lisp and Scheme during their studies? The program also illustrates the use of unit testing to detect newly introduced flaws in the code as it evolves in the software life cycle.

Enjoy and may your Maple skills profit from the experience!

Best regards,

Marko Riedel

The software is also available here: dfam-mult.txt

Dear friends,

some time ago I shared a story here on the use of Maple to compute the cycle index of the induced action on the edges of an ordinary graph of the symmetric group permuting the vertices and the use of the Polya Enumeration Theorem to count non-isomorphic graphs by the number of edges. It can be found at the following Mapleprimes link.

I am writing today to alert you to another simple Maple program that is closely related and demonstrates Maple's capability to implement concepts from group theory and Polya enumeration. This link at Math.Stackexchange.com shows how to use the cycle index of the induced action by the symmetric group permuting vertices on the edges of a multigraph that includes loops to count set partitions of multisets containing two instances of n distinct types of items. The sequence that corresponds to these set partitions is OEIS A020555 where it is pointed out that we can equivalently count multigraphs with n labeled i.e. distinct edges where the vertices of the graph represent the multisets of the multiset partition and are connected by an edge k if the two instances of the value k are included in the sets represented by the two vertices that constitute the edge. The problem then reduces to a simple substitution into the aforementioned cycle index of a polynomial representing the set of labels on an edge including no labels on an edge that is not included.

This computation presents a remarkable simplicity while also implementing a non-trivial application of Polya counting. It is hoped that MaplePrimes users will enjoy reading this program, possibly profit from some of the techniques employed and be motivated to use Maple in their work on combinatorics problems.

Best regards,

Marko Riedel

Greetings to all.

I am writing to alert MaplePrimes users to a Maple package that makes an remarkable contribution to combinatorics and really ought to be part of your discrete math / symbolic combinatorics class if you teach one. The combstruct package was developed at INRIA in Paris, France, by the algorithmics research team of P. Flajolet during the mid 1990s. This software package features a parser for grammars involving combinatorial operators such as sequence, set or multiset and it can derive functional equations from the grammar as well as exponential and ordinary generating functions for labeled and unlabeled enumeration. Coefficients of these generating functions can be computed. All of it easy to use and very powerful. If you are doing research on some type of combinatorial structure definitely check with combstruct first.

My purpose in this message is to advise you of the existence of this package and encourage you to use it in your teaching and research. With this in mind I present five applications of the combstruct package. These are very basic efforts that admit improvement that can perhaps serve as an incentive to deploy combstruct nonetheless. Here they are:

• A parity bias for trees
• Number of nodes with even offspring
• Trees with odd degree sequence
• Ordered rooted trees with all nodes having at least two child nodes
• Average depth of a leaf in an ordered binary tree

I hope you enjoy reading these and perhaps you might want to feature combstruct as well, which presented the first complete implementation in a computer algebra system of the symbolic method, sometimes called the folklore theorem of combinatorial enumeration, when it initially appeared.

Best regards,

Marko Riedel.

Greetings to all.

As some of you may remember I have posted several announcements concerning Power Group Enumeration and the Polya Enumeration Theorem this past year, e.g. at this MaplePrimes link: Power Group Enumeration.

I have continued to work in this field and for those of you who have followed the earlier threads I would like to present some links to my more recent work using the Burnside lemma. Of course all of these are programmed in Maple and include the Maple code and it is with the demonstration of Maple's group theory capabilities in mind that I present them to you (math.stackexchange links).

• Power Group Enumeration with two instances of the symmetric group by Burnside
• Multisets of n permutations of [n] with the symmetric group acting on the permutation elements
• Counting binary structures
• Primitive necklaces, the Mobius function, and Power Group Enumeration
• Edge colorings of the cube and Power Group Enumeration
• Counting functions by Simultaneous Power Group Enumeration
• Subsets of a standard 52 card deck wrt. suit permutation
• Systems of lottery tickets wrt. the symmetric group acting on the values
• Stirling numbers and Power Group Enumeration
• Binary matrices with a fixed number of ones per column under row and column permutations

The third and fourth to last link in particular include advanced Maple code.

The second entry is new as of October 30 2015.

With my best wishes for happy group theory computing with Maple,

Regards,

Marko Riedel

Greetings to all.

I would like to share a brief observation concerning my experiences with the Euler-Maclaurin summation routine in Maple 17 (X86 64 LINUX). The following Math StackExchange Link shows how to compute a certain Euler-MacLaurin type asymptotic expansion using highly unorthodox divergent series summation techniques. The result that was obtained matches the output from eulermac which is definitely good to know. What follows is the output from said routine.

> eulermac(1/(1+k/n),k=0..n,18);
     1       929569        3202291        691                O(1)
O(- ---) - ----------- + ----------- - --------- + 1/1048576 ----
     19             15            17          11              19
    n      2097152 n     1048576 n     32768 n               n

                                           n
                                          /
        174611      5461        31       |      1           17        1
     - -------- + --------- + ------- +  |   ------- dk - ------- + ------
             19          13         9    |   1 + k/n            7        5
       6600 n     65536 n     4096 n    /                 4096 n    256 n
                                          0

         1       1
     - ------ + ---- + 3/4
            3   16 n
       128 n

While I realize that this is good enough for most purposes I have two minor issues.

• One could certainly evaluate the integral without leaving it to the user to force evaluation with the AllSolutions option. One can and should make use of what is known about n and k. In particular one can check whether there are singularities on the integration path because we know the range of k/n.
• Why are there two order terms for the order of the remainder term? There should be at most one and a coefficient times an O(1) term makes little sense as the coefficient would be absorbed.

You might want to fix these so that the output looks a bit more professional which does enter into play when potential future users decide on what CAS to commit to. Other than that it is a very useful routine even for certain harmonic sum computations where one can use Euler-Maclaurin to verify results.

Best regards,

Marko Riedel