Partial words and the interaction property of periods
Arsenii Mihailovich Shur, Yuliy Vasil'evna Gamzova · Izvestiya Mathematics · 2004
A theorem of Fine and Wilf expresses the interaction property of periods, which is a basic property of periodic words. An arbitrary word with given periods p and q also has a derived period gcd(p,q) if the length of the word is greater than some critical value called the length of interaction. In this paper we consider a similar property for arbitrary periodic partial words and give a sharp linear bound for the length of interaction.