On universal partial words

A universal word for a finite alphabet A and some integer n ≥ 1 is a word over A such that every word in An appears exactly once as a subword (cyclically or linearly). It is well-known and easy to prove that universal words exist for any A and n. In this work we initiate the systematic study of universal partial words. These are words that in addition to the letters from A may contain an arbitrary number of occurrences of a special ‘joker’ symbol ✸ / ∈ A, which can be substituted by any symbol from A. For example, u = 0✸011100 is a linear partial word for the binary alphabet A = {0, 1} and for n = 3 (e.g., the first three letters of u yield the subwords 000 and 010). We present results on the existence and non-existence of linear and cyclic universal partial words in different situations (depending on the number of ✸s and their positions), including various explicit constructions. We also provide numerous examples of universal partial words that we found with the help of a computer.