A characterization of Sturmian sequences by indistinguishable asymptotic pairs (Q2033924)

Two bi-infinite sequences (i.e., two sequences indexed by \({\mathbb Z}\)) that only differ at indexes belonging to a finite set \(F\), are said to form an indistinguishable asymptotic pair if the sets of occurrences of every pattern in each sequence coincide up to a permutation with finite support. The authors of the paper under review give a characterization of bi-infinite Sturmian sequences in terms of indistinguishable asymptotic pairs. They also give a characterization of indistinguishable asymptotic pairs on any alphabet of cardinality \(\geq 2\).