Forbidden substrings, Kolmogorov complexity and almost periodic sequences

Andrey Yu. Rumyantsev, Maxim Ushakov

Abstract: Assume that for some $\alpha<1$ and for all nutural $n$ a set $F_n$ of at most $2^{\alpha n}$ "forbidden" binary strings of length $n$ is fixed. Then there exists an infinite binary sequence $\omega$ that does not have (long) forbidden substrings. We prove this combinatorial statement by translating it into a statement about Kolmogorov complexity and compare this proof with a combinatorial one based on Laslo Lovasz local lemma. Then we construct an almost periodic sequence with the same property (thus combines the results of Levin and Muchnik-Semenov-Ushakov). Both the combinatorial proof and Kolmogorov complexity argument can be generalized to the multidimensional case.