Cyclic Equalizability Characterized by Parikh Vectors

TL;DR

This paper characterizes cyclic equalizability of two words over any finite alphabet, showing it is equivalent to having identical Parikh vectors, extending previous binary results.

Contribution

It provides a complete characterization of cyclic equalizability for two words over arbitrary alphabets using Parikh vectors, generalizing prior binary findings.

Findings

Two words are cyclically equalizable iff they share the same Parikh vector.

The result generalizes the binary case where equalizability depends on Hamming weight.

The characterization applies to words over any finite alphabet.

Abstract

Cyclic equalizability is a notion introduced by Shinagawa and Nuida in 2025, in the study of card-based cryptography. Informally, a collection of words is cyclically equalizable if, by inserting the same letters at the same positions in all words, they can be transformed into words that are cyclic shifts of one another. Shinagawa and Nuida showed that two binary words of equal length are cyclically equalizable if and only if they have the same Hamming weight. They also posed the problem of characterizing cyclic equalizability over larger alphabets. In this paper, we completely characterize cyclic equalizability for two words over an arbitrary finite alphabet by proving that two words are cyclically equalizable if and only if they have the same Parikh vector.