Maxime Crochemore

String matching is one of the oldest algorithmic techniques, yet still one of the most pervasive in computer science. The past 20 years have seen technological leaps in applications as diverse as information retrieval and compression. This copiously illustrated collection of puzzles and exercises in key areas of text algorithms and combinatorics on words offers graduate students and researchers a pleasant and direct way to learn and practice with advanced concepts. The problems are drawn from a large range of scientific publications, both classic and new. Building up from the basics, the book goes on to showcase problems in combinatorics on words (including Fibonacci or Thue-Morse words), pattern matching (including Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore like algorithms), efficient text data structures (including suffix trees and suffix arrays), regularities in words (including periods and runs) and text compression (including Huffman, Lempel-Ziv and Burrows-Wheeler based methods).

String matching is one of the oldest algorithmic techniques, yet still one of the most pervasive in computer science. The past 20 years have seen technological leaps in applications as diverse as information retrieval and compression. This copiously illustrated collection of puzzles and exercises in key areas of text algorithms and combinatorics on words offers graduate students and researchers a pleasant and direct way to learn and practice with advanced concepts. The problems are drawn from a large range of scientific publications, both classic and new. Building up from the basics, the book goes on to showcase problems in combinatorics on words (including Fibonacci or Thue-Morse words), pattern matching (including Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Boyer-Moore like algorithms), efficient text data structures (including suffix trees and suffix arrays), regularities in words (including periods and runs) and text compression (including Huffman, Lempel-Ziv and Burrows-Wheeler based methods).

The book is intended for lectures on string processes and pattern matching in Master's courses of computer science and software engineering curricula. The details of algorithms are given with correctness proofs and complexity analysis, which make them ready to implement. Algorithms are described in a C-like language. The book is also a reference for students in computational linguistics or computational biology. It presents examples of questions related to the automatic processing of natural language, to the analysis of molecular sequences, and to the management of textual databases.

The term “stringology” is a popular nickname for text algorithms, or algorithms on strings. This book deals with the most basic algorithms in the area. Most of them can be viewed as “algorithmic jewels” and deserve reader-friendly presentation. One of the main aims of the book is to present several of the most celebrated algorithms in a simple way by omitting obscuring details and separating algorithmic structure from combinatorial theoretical background. The book reflects the relationships between applications of text-algorithmic techniques and the classification of algorithms according to the measures of complexity considered. The text can be viewed as a parade of algorithms in which the main purpose is to discuss the foundations of the algorithms and their interconnections. One can partition the algorithmic problems discussed into practical and theoretical problems. Certainly, string matching and data compression are in the former class, while most problems related to symmetries and repetitions in texts are in the latter. However, all the problems are interesting from an algorithmic point of view and enable the reader to appreciate the importance of combinatorics on words as a tool in the design of efficient text algorithms.In most textbooks on algorithms and data structures, the presentation of efficient algorithms on words is quite short as compared to issues in graph theory, sorting, searching, and some other areas. At the same time, there are many presentations of interesting algorithms on words accessible only in journals and in a form directed mainly at specialists. This book fills the gap in the book literature on algorithms on words, and brings together the many results presently dispersed in the masses of journal articles. The presentation is reader-friendly; many examples and about two hundred figures illustrate nicely the behaviour of otherwise very complex algorithms.

The term “stringology” is a popular nickname for text algorithms, or algorithms on strings. This book deals with the most basic algorithms in the area. Most of them can be viewed as “algorithmic jewels” and deserve reader-friendly presentation. One of the main aims of the book is to present several of the most celebrated algorithms in a simple way by omitting obscuring details and separating algorithmic structure from combinatorial theoretical background. The book reflects the relationships between applications of text-algorithmic techniques and the classification of algorithms according to the measures of complexity considered. The text can be viewed as a parade of algorithms in which the main purpose is to discuss the foundations of the algorithms and their interconnections. One can partition the algorithmic problems discussed into practical and theoretical problems. Certainly, string matching and data compression are in the former class, while most problems related to symmetries and repetitions in texts are in the latter. However, all the problems are interesting from an algorithmic point of view and enable the reader to appreciate the importance of combinatorics on words as a tool in the design of efficient text algorithms.In most textbooks on algorithms and data structures, the presentation of efficient algorithms on words is quite short as compared to issues in graph theory, sorting, searching, and some other areas. At the same time, there are many presentations of interesting algorithms on words accessible only in journals and in a form directed mainly at specialists. This book fills the gap in the book literature on algorithms on words, and brings together the many results presently dispersed in the masses of journal articles. The presentation is reader-friendly; many examples and about two hundred figures illustrate nicely the behaviour of otherwise very complex algorithms.