Retracts of free monoids are nowhere dense with respect to finite group topologies and p-adic topologies.
A parallel communicating automata system consists of several automata working independently in parallel and communicating with each other by request with the aim of recognizing a word. Rather surprisingly, returning parallel communicating finite automata systems are equivalent to the non-returning variants. We show this result by proving the equivalence of both with multihead finite automata. Some open problems are finally formulated.
Six kinds of both of primitivity and periodicity of words, introduced by Ito and Lischke [M. Ito and G. Lischke, Math. Log. Quart. 53 (2007) 91–106; Corrigendum in Math. Log. Quart. 53 (2007) 642–643], give rise to defining six kinds of roots of a nonempty word. For 1 ≤ k ≤ 6, a k-root word is a word which has exactly k different roots, and a k-cluster is a set of k-root words u where the roots of u fulfil a given prefix relationship. We show that out of the 89 different clusters that can be considered...