String factorisations with maximum or minimum dimension

Abstract

In this paper we consider two problems concerning string factorisation. Specifically given a string $w$ and an integer $k$ find a factorisation of $w$ where each factor has length bounded by $k$ and has the minimum (the FmD problem) or the maximum (the FMD problem) number of different factors. The FmD has been proved to be NP-hard even if $k=2$ in [9] and for this case we provide a $3/2$-approximation algorithm. The FMD problem, up to our knowledge has not been considered in the literature. We show that this problem is NP-hard for any $k\ge 3$. In view of this we propose a $2$-approximation algorithm (for any $k$) an exact exponential algorithm. We conclude with some open problems.