Lyndon Arrays in Sublinear Time

Abstract

A Lyndon word is a string that is lexicographically smaller than all of its non-trivial suffixes. For example, airbus is a Lyndon word, but amtrak is not a Lyndon word due to its suffix ak. The Lyndon array stores the length of the longest Lyndon prefix of each suffix of a string. For a length-n string over a general ordered alphabet, the array can be computed in O(n) time (Bille et al., ICALP 2020). However, on a word-RAM of word-width w ≥ log₂ n, linear time is not optimal if the string is over integer alphabet {0, … , σ} with σ ≪ n. In this case, the string can be stored in O(n log σ) bits (or O(n / log_σ n) words) of memory, and reading it takes only O(n / log_σ n) time. We show that O(n / log_σ n) time and words of space suffice to compute the succinct 2n-bit version of the Lyndon array. The time is optimal for w = O(log n). The algorithm uses precomputed lookup tables to perform significant parts of the computation in constant time. This is possible due to properties of periodic substrings, which we carefully analyze to achieve the desired result. We envision that the algorithm has applications in the computation of runs (maximal periodic substrings), where the Lyndon array plays a central role in both theoretically and practically fast algorithms.