FLOTT-A Fast, Low Memory T-transform Algorithm for Measuring String Complexity

Abstract

This paper presents flott, a fast, low memory T-transform algorithm which can be used to compute the string complexity measure T-complexity. The algorithm uses approximately one third of the memory of its predecessor while reducing the running time by about 20%. The flott implementation has the same worst-case memory requirements as state of the art suffix tree construction algorithms. A suffix tree can be used to efficiently compute the Lempel-Ziv production complexity, which is another measure of string complexity. The C-implementation of flott is available as Open Source software.