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String complexity is defined as the cardinality of a set of all distinct words (factors) of a given string. For two strings, we introduce the joint string complexity as the cardinality of a set of words that are common to both strings. String complexity finds a number of applications from capturing the richness of a language to finding similarities between two genome sequences. In this paper we analyze the joint string complexity when both strings are generated by Markov sources. We prove that the joint string complexity grows linearly (in terms of the string lengths) when both sources are statistically indistinguishable and sublinearly when sources are statistically not the same. Precise analysis of the joint string complexity turns out to be quite challenging requiring subtle singularity analysis and saddle point method over infinity many saddle points leading to novel oscillatory phenomena with single and double periodicities. To overcome these challenges, we apply powerful analytic techniques such as multivariate generating functions, multivariate depoissonization and Mellin transform, spectral matrix analysis, and complex asymptotic methods.

We present a measure of string complexity, called I-complexity, computable in linear time and space. It counts the number of different substrings in a given string. The least complex strings are the runs of a single symbol, the most complex are the de Bruijn strings. Although the I-complexity of a string is not the length of any minimal description of the string, it satisfies many basic properties of classical description complexity. In particular, the number of strings with I-complexity up to a given value is bounded, and most strings of each length have high I-complexity. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Fil:Becher, V. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina. Fil:Heiber, P.A. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.

String complexity is defined as the cardinality of a set of all distinct words (factors) of a given string. For two strings, we define $\textit{joint string complexity}$ as the set of words that are common to both strings. We also relax this definition and introduce $\textit{joint semi-complexity}$ restricted to the common words appearing at least twice in both strings. String complexity finds a number of applications from capturing the richness of a language to finding similarities between two genome sequences. In this paper we analyze joint complexity and joint semi-complexity when both strings are generated by a Markov source. The problem turns out to be quite challenging requiring subtle singularity analysis and saddle point method over infinity many saddle points leading to novel oscillatory phenomena with single and double periodicities.