We investigate the Sandpile Model and Chip Firing Game and an extension of these modelson cycle graphs. The extended model consists of allowing a negative number of chips ateach vertex. We give the characterization of reachable configurations and of fixed pointsof each model. At the end, we give explicit formula for the number of their fixedpoints.

We introduce a type of isomorphism among strategic games that we call localisomorphism. Local isomorphisms is a weaker version of the notions of strongand weak game isomorphism introduced in [J. Gabarro, A. Garcia and M. Serna,Theor. Comput. Sci. 412 (2011) 6675–6695]. In a localisomorphism it is required to preserve, for any player, the player’s preferences on thesets of strategy profiles that differ only in the action selected by this player. We showthat the game isomorphism problem for local isomorphism is equivalent to the same problemfor strong or weak isomorphism for strategic games given in: general, extensive andformula general form. As a consequence of the results in [J. Gabarro, A. Garcia and M.Serna, Theor. Comput. Sci. 412 (2011) 6675–6695] thisimplies that local isomorphism problem for strategic games is equivalent to (a) thecircuit isomorphism problem for games given in general form, (b) the boolean formulaisomorphism problem for formula games in general form, and (c) the graph isomorphismproblem for games given in explicit form.

A Message Authentication Code (MAC) is a function that takes a message and a key asparameters and outputs an authentication of the message. MAC are used to guarantee thelegitimacy of messages exchanged through a network, since generating a correctauthentication requires the knowledge of the key defined secretly by trusted parties.However, an attacker with access to a sufficiently large number of message/authenticationpairs may use a brute force algorithm to infer the secret key: from a set containinginitially all possible key candidates, subsequently remove those that yield an incorrectauthentication, proceeding this way for each intercepted message/authentication pair untila single key remains. In this paper, we determine an exact formula for the expected numberof message/authentication pairs that must be used before such form of attack issuccessful, along with an asymptotical bound that is both simple and tight. We conclude byillustrating a modern application where this bound comes in handy, namely the estimationof security levels in reflection-based verification of software integrity.

The cutwidth is an important graph-invariant in circuit layout designs. The cutwidth of agraph G is the minimum value of the maximum number of overlap edges whenG is embedded into a line. A caterpillar is a tree which yields a pathwhen all its leaves are removed. An iterated caterpillar is a tree which yields acaterpillar when all its leaves are removed. In this paper we present an exact formula forthe cutwidth of the iterated caterpillars.

Most of the constructions of infinite words having polynomial subword complexity are quite complicated, e.g., sequences of Toeplitz, sequences defined by billiards in the cube, etc. In this paper, we describe a simple method for constructing infinite words w over a binary alphabet  { a,b }  with polynomial subword complexity pw. Assuming w contains an infinite number of a’s, our method is based on the gap function which gives the distances between consecutive b’s. It is known that if the gap function is injective, we can obtain at most quadratic subword complexity, and if the gap function is blockwise injective, we can obtain at most cubic subword complexity. Here, we construct infinite binary words w such that pw(n) = Θ(nβ) for any real number β > 1.

In this paper we prove the decidability of the HD0L ultimate periodicity problem.