Abstract

The size b of the smallest bidirectional macro scheme, which is arguably the most general copy-paste scheme to generate a given sequence, is considered to be the strictest reachable measure of repetitiveness. It is strictly lower-bounded by measures like gamma and delta, which are known or believed to be unreachable and to capture the entropy of repetitiveness. In this paper we study another sequence generation mechanism, namely compositions of a morphism. We show that these form another plausible mechanism to characterize repetitive sequences and define NU-systems, which combine such a mechanism with macro schemes. We show that the size nu <= b of the smallest NU-system is reachable and can be o(delta) for some string families, thereby implying that the limit of compressibility of repetitive sequences can be even smaller than previously thought. We also derive several other results characterizing nu.