A suffix automaton is a powerful data structure that represents all the suffixes of a given string efficiently. One of its key properties is that it is minimal, meaning it has the smallest number of states possible for the string it represents, which allows for efficient operations such as substring searching. The suffix automaton has a linear size with respect to the length of the string, specifically , where is the length of the string.
Another important property is that it can be constructed in linear time, making it suitable for applications in text processing and pattern matching. Furthermore, each state in the suffix automaton corresponds to a unique substring of the original string, and transitions between states represent the addition of characters to these substrings. This structure also allows for efficient computation of various string properties, such as the longest common substring or the number of distinct substrings.
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