Quasi-periodicity in streams

In this work, we show two streaming algorithms for computing the length of the shortest cover of a string of length n. We start by showing a two-pass algorithm that uses O(log^2 n) space and then show a one-pass streaming algorithm that uses O(sqrt{n log n}) space. Both algorithms run in near-linear time. The algorithms are randomized and compute the answer incorrectly with probability inverse-polynomial in n. We also show that there is no sublinear-space streaming algorithm for computing the length of the shortest seed of a string.