Large-scale detection of repetitions

Combinatorics on words began more than a century ago with a demonstration that an infinitely long string with no repetitions could be constructed on an alphabet of only three letters. Computing all the repetitions (such as ∙∙∙TTT ∙∙∙ or ∙∙∙ CGACGA ∙∙∙ ) in a given string x of length n is one of the oldest and most important problems of computational stringology, requiring time in the worst case. About a dozen years ago, it was discovered that …