String Covering: A Survey

Abstract

The study of strings is an important combinatorial field that precedes thedigital computer. Strings can be very long, trillions of letters, so it isimportant to find compact representations. Here we first survey various formsof one potential compaction methodology, the cover of a given string x,initially proposed in a simple form in 1990, but increasingly of interest asmore sophisticated variants have been discovered. We then consider covering bya seed; that is, a cover of a superstring of x. We conclude with many proposalsfor research directions that could make significant contributions to stringprocessing in future