194 Combinatorics of Compositions and Words
Several authors have considered other types of patterns besides subsequence
patterns. Burstein and Mansour [33, 34] enumerated words according to gen-
eralized patterns of length three as well as words containing a subword pattern
of length exactly r times, while Kitaev and Mansour [109] studied partially
ordered generalized patterns.
In this chapter we sample some of the results. After defining some notation
in Section 6.2, we give examples of how results for words can be recovered
from those for compositions in Section 6.3. We also summarize results for
subword patterns of length three and give a result for the pattern peak.
The focus of Sections 6.4 and 6.5 is on subsequence patterns. We start by
giving classifications of the patterns up to length five, based on the results by
Jel´ınek and Mansour [105], who connected Wilf-equivalence with equivalence
of fillings of Ferrers diagrams by expressing words as matrices. The connec-
tion between the two types of equivalence gives surprisingly general results
using previously known results on fillings of Ferrers diagrams [127]. Using sys-
tematic computer enumeration of small patterns we verify that these results,
together with the reversal and complement maps, are sufficient to describe all
Wilf-equivalence classes for patterns of length six or less.
Next, we give results for generating functions for subsequence permutation
and multi-permutation patterns of length three. One of the major results in
pattern avoidance of subsequence patterns was the derivation of the generating
function for the pattern 132. We give three different proofs for this result.
The first proof will illustrate the Noonan-Zeilberger algorithm as it applies to
words, the second one will utilize block decomposition, a very useful tool in
enumeration of words, and the third proof will showcase the scanning-element
algorithm. Each of these approaches has advantages and disadvantages, as
will become clear in this parallel treatment. We conclude the discussion of
permutation patterns of length three by giving results on avoidance of pairs
of patterns and their generalizations, as well as results for the generating
functions of words containing the patterns 123 and 132, respectively exactly
once.
In the last two sections we present results on generalized patterns and on
partially ordered patterns obtained from the results for compositions pre-
sented in Chapter 5.
6.2 Definitions and basic results
Before giving any results, we will state the basic notation, nearly identical
to that for compositions, for the generating functions of interest. Recall that
[k] denotes an ordered alphabet, and that [k]
n
denotes the set of k-ary words
of length n (see Definition 1.7).
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