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A universal cycle, or u-cycle, for a given set of words is a circular word that contains each word from the set exactly once as a contiguous subword. The celebrated de Bruijn sequences are a particular case of such a u-cycle, where a set in question is the set $A^n$ of all words of length $n$ over a $k$-letter alphabet $A$. A universal word, or u-word, is a linear, i.e. non-circular, version of the notion of a u-cycle, and it is defined similarly. Removing some words in $A^n$ may, or may not, result in a set of words for which u-cycle, or u-word, exists. The goal of this paper is to study the probability of existence of the universal objects in such a situation. We give lower bounds for the probability in general cases, and also derive explicit answers for the case of removing up to two words in $A^n$, or the case when $k=2$ and $n\leq 4$., Comment: 17 pages, 4 tables

A graph $G=(V,E)$ is word-representable if there exists a word $w$ over the alphabet $V$ such that letters $x$ and $y$ alternate in $w$ if and only if $(x,y)\in E$. A triangular grid graph is a subgraph of a tiling of the plane with equilateral triangles defined by a finite number of triangles, called cells. A subdivision of a triangular grid graph is replacing some of its cells by plane copies of the complete graph $K_4$. Inspired by a recent elegant result of Akrobotu et al., who classified word-representable triangulations of grid graphs related to convex polyominoes, we characterize word-representable subdivisions of triangular grid graphs. A key role in the characterization is played by smart orientations introduced by us in this paper. As a corollary to our main result, we obtain that any subdivision of boundary triangles in the Sierpi\'{n}ski gasket graph is word-representable.

A universal word for a finite alphabet $A$ and some integer $n\geq 1$ is a word over $A$ such that every word in $A^n$ 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 $\Diamond\notin A$, which can be substituted by any symbol from $A$. For example, $u=0\Diamond 011100$ 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 $\Diamond$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., Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science ; Vol. 19 no. 1 ; 1365-8050