Concept

Phrase — where it appears

One piece of a Lempel-Ziv parse: a source position and a length, or a literal character where nothing earlier matched. It is the unit an index proportional to z stores, and the unit an occurrence either lies inside — making it a copy of an earlier one — or crosses.

Named by 15 essays across 6 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

is·holds·no·the·the·of·of·rather·count·class·that·is·algorithm·o1111111211111151141131111111211122213111111212phrase lengths below each block · a shaded block is a literalEnglish-like · 64 charactersz = 46 · 17 literals

The phrases a text copies from itself

Four thousand characters of English-like text hold 604 phrases in the greedy parse and 1,219 runs in the transform. Thirty-two copies of one text hold 156 phrases and 233 runs. Two measures of repetition, neither of them an entropy, and they do not agree about which text is the more repetitive.

text · Parse
1,00010,00010⁴bits12481632characters in the collection · copies aboveFM-index, compressedr-indexphrase indexEnglish-like · divergence 0z 156 · r 233

An index with z in its size

Over thirty-two copies of one text, an index built on the parse is 8,892 bits, the r-index is 17,047 and the entropy-bounded index is 34,615. Over eight thousand characters of four-symbol text the same three are 7,844, 25,177 and 20,413, and the smallest of the three has changed places twice.

indexes · Parse
1,00010,000110occurrences12481632characters in the collection · copies aboveall occurrencessecondaryprimarypattern "ss is un" · z = 1561 primary · 31 secondary

The occurrences that cross a boundary

One pattern, thirty-two copies of a text, thirty-two occurrences. The search finds one of them and produces the other thirty-one by arithmetic, and the count it finds is the same one at two copies, at eight and at thirty-two — the searching does not grow when the answer does.

text · Parse
1,00010,00010⁴bits12481632characters in the collection · copies aboveFM-index, compressedr-indexphrase indexEnglish-like · divergence 0z 156 · r 233

The collection decides which index is small

Three compressed self-indexes over one text of five hundred characters measure 3,511, 7,285 and 10,974 bits. Repeat that text thirty-two times and the same three measure 34,615, 8,892 and 17,047 — the ordering has completely reversed, and nothing about any of the structures changed.

indexes · Repeat
rank among the boundaries, sorted by the text before themsorted by the text after0 in the rectanglepattern "ss is un"split after 40 end with the left half0 begin with the rightEnglish-like · 2 copies of 512z = 156 · 0 crossing

The candidates a filter cannot avoid

A phrase index answers a search by intersecting two ranges of boundaries, and it does the intersection by walking the smaller one. On a collection of thirty-two copies that is 4,355 phrase examinations to produce 32 occurrences — 136 examinations each, and rising.

indexes · Grid
124816nonephrasescap on the copy chainphrasesworst chainEnglish-like · 8,192 charactersz 156 to 7,351

A parse that will not follow a long chain

A greedy self-referential parse bounds the copy depth by nothing at all — thirty-two copies of a text give a position costing twenty-two phrase follows. Restricting every phrase to sources no deeper than D holds it at D, and the whole question is what that costs.

text · Parse
depth 0190.1%depth 19642.9%depth 24,92915.0%depth 37,00921.4%depth 48,47325.9%depth 56,24119.0%depth 63,31010.1%depth 71,2503.8%depth 84221.3%depth 91240.4%depth 10270.1%positions32,768 characters · 1172 phrasesmean 3.98

The number that would choose a cap

A depth histogram is one linear pass — 3.16 operations a character over thirty-two thousand of them — and it says the whole text sits at a mean depth of 3.98 with a worst of ten. Nobody prints it, and every choice of cap in this collection was made without it.

practice · Parse
1,00010,00010phrases followed12481632characters in the collection · copies aboveworst depthmean depthEnglish-like · z = 156median 18 · 90th 31

The character that costs a chain

The index over thirty-two copies is 8,892 bits and does not grow. Producing one character of the text it indexes costs 17.89 phrase-follows on average and 38 in the worst case, against 2.38 and 7 at one copy — the size stopped growing and the price of reading it did not.

space · Parse
11010⁴10⁵worst copy chain, phrases followedbits124816noneno capcap on each pointEnglish-like · 16 copies of 512z 156 to 7,351

What a ceiling costs in phrases

A cap of sixteen costs one phrase of a hundred and fifty-six and halves the worst chain. A cap of four costs six times the phrases. The curve between them is flat at one end and vertical at the other, and the elbow is where a structure should be built.

indexes · Parse
124816nonephrasescap on the copy chainphrasesworst chainEnglish-like · 8,192 charactersz 156 to 7,351

The term that came back

A phrase index is worth building because 8,192 characters parse into 156 phrases. Cap the copy depth at one and the same text parses into 7,351 — ninety per cent of the characters — and the structure is proportional to the text again.

space · Parse
11010³cap on the depthphrases9.8% more phrasesevery occurrence consideredthe earliest only4,096 charactersworst at cap 4

The cap an automaton cannot see

A state of a suffix automaton stands for a set of occurrences and hands back one of them. So a capped parse driven by it can ask whether the earliest occurrence is shallow enough and cannot ask whether any occurrence is — which costs up to 9.8% of the phrases, and only at the caps that bind.

bounds · Parse
1,00010⁴10⁵10⁶charactersoperationscharacter comparisonstransitions and linksrepetitive · 8 copies346 phrases at 8,192

The parse in one pass of the text

The same parse, phrase for phrase, from 1,324,336 character comparisons or from 25,420 transitions and suffix-link steps. One of those numbers grows with the text and the other grows with its square, and the difference is why every measurement about a depth cap here was taken on a few thousand characters.

text · Parse
1001,00010characters in the wordruns · phrasesr, worse orderz, either orderr, better orderFibonacci words · two symbolsspread 1.50x to 3.17x

The measure that cannot see the alphabet

Take a Fibonacci word of 4,181 characters and transform it with a before b — six runs. Transform the same word with b before a — nineteen. The parse gives eighteen phrases either way, and the gap between the two run counts grows with every word in the family.

wrong · Parse
a text that repeats itself2.96xchain 13 · z 110English-like1.31xchain 10 · z 604four symbols, uniform1.28xchain 10 · z 816periodic, period 171.11xchain 9 · z 1,285phrases under a cap of four, against no cap4,096 characters each2.96x to 1.11x

The cap that binds on one text and not another

A periodic text looks like the one made of chains and pays 1.11 times the phrases for a cap of four. A text that repeats itself pays 2.96. The guess is backwards, and the reason is that depth measures nesting rather than repetition.

wrong · Parse
11010⁴cap on the depthphrasesno capcap 165,536 characters · 16 copies26x at cap 1

What a quadratic construction was setting

A depth cap of one costs 90% of an 8,192-character text in phrases, and 86% of a 65,536-character one. The ladder's conclusions hold at thirty-two times the size — and the number the ladder could not reach, the deepest chain a real collection produces, turns out to be fourteen.

wrong · Parse

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

MeasurementRepetitionTrade offLempel ziv parseIndex sizeSelf-indexCompressibilityCopy depthR-indexLocateBounded depth parseConstruction

All concepts