AVOIDING APPROXIMATE SQUARES.

As is well-known, Axel Thue constructed an infinite word over a 3-letter alphabet that contains no squares, that is, no nonempty subwords of the form xx. In this paper we consider a variation on this problem, where we try to avoid approximate squares, that is, subwords of the form xx' where |x| = |x'| and x and x' are "nearly" identical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]