On Stricter Reachable Repetitiveness Measures*

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 $\nu \leq b$ 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 $\nu$.