Explicit Combinatoric Structures of Palindromes and Chromatic Number of Restriction Graphs

Abstract: The palindromic fingerprint of a string $S[1\ldots n]$ is the set $PF(S) = {(i,j)~|~ S[i\ldots j] \textit{ is a maximal }\ \textit{palindrome substring of } S}$. In this work, we consider the problem of string reconstruction from a palindromic fingerprint. That is, given an input set of pairs $PF \subseteq [1\ldots n] \times [1\ldots n]$ for an integer $n$, we wish to determine if $PF$ is a valid palindromic fingerprint for a string $S$, and if it is, output a string $S$ such that $PF= PF(S)$. I et al. [SPIRE2010] showed a linear reconstruction algorithm from a palindromic fingerprint that outputs the lexicographically smallest string over a minimum alphabet. They also presented an upper bound of $\mathcal{O}(\log(n))$ for the maximal number of characters in the minimal alphabet. In this paper, we show tight combinatorial bounds for the palindromic fingerprint reconstruction problem. We present the string $S_k$, which is the shortest string whose fingerprint $PF(S_k)$ cannot be reconstructed using less than $k$ characters. The results additionally solve an open problem presented by I et al.