Decimation and interleaving operations in one-sided symbolic dynamics (Q2020044)

A decimation of an infinite sequence is the subsequence along an arithmetic progression, and interleaving (or shuffling) means creating a sequence from several sequences by choosing alternatingly the elements from each sequence. The authors study the effects of these operations on sets of sequences. First, they consider the interleaving closure \(X^{[n]}\) that contains all sequences which can be obtained by interleaving \(n\) decimations of elements of \(X\) along index sequences \((i+kn)_{k\in\mathbb{N}}\), \(0 \le i < n\). They show that \((X^{[m]})^{[n]} = X^{[\mathrm{lcm}(m,n)]}\), and that \(X^{[n]} = X\) if and only if \(X\) is given by interleaving \(n\) sets of sequences. The set of positive integers \(n\) satisfying \(X^{[n]} = X\) is a distributive lattice under the divisibility partial order and downward closed under divisibility, and all sets of positive integers with these two properties can be obtained from some \(X\). While the shift operation acts compatibly with decimations and with \(n\)-fold interleaving, the class of shift-invariant sets and the class of shift-stable sets are not preserved under interleaving. Therefore, the authors define weakly shift-stable sets by the property \(S^k X \subseteq S^j X\) for some \(k > j\). The class of such sets is closed by the shift and under all decimation and interleaving operations. If \(X\) is weakly shift-stable and an interleaving of \(X_1, \dots, X_n\), then the topological entropy satisfies \(H_{\mathrm{top}}(X) = \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=0}^{n-1} H_{\mathrm{top}}(X_i)\). If \(X\) is not weakly shift-stable, then the inequality \(H_p(X) \le \frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=0}^{n-1} H_p(X_i)\) for the prefix entropy might be strict, and it is possible that \(H_p(X) < H_{\mathrm{top}}(X)\). The authors also remark that the family of operations obtained under iterated composition using interleaving operations of all arities determines a non-symmetric operad.