Normal Numbers and the Normality Measure

Abstract

In a paper published in this journal, Alon, Kohayakawa, Mauduit, Moreira and Rödl proved that the minimal possible value of the normality measure of an N-element binary sequence satisfies \begin{equation*} \biggl( \frac{1}{2} + o(1) \biggr) \log_2 N \leq \min_{E_N \in \{0,1\}^N} \mathcal{N}(E_N) \leq 3 N^{1/3} (\log N)^{2/3} \end{equation*} for sufficiently large N, and conjectured that the lower bound can be improved to some power of N. In this note it is observed that a construction of Levin of a normal number having small discrepancy gives a construction of a binary sequence EN with (EN) = O((log N)2), thus disproving the conjecture above.