Locally Restricted Compositions IV. Nearly Free Large Parts and Gap-Freeness

Abstract

We define the notion of asymptotically free for locally restricted compositions, which means roughly that large parts can often be replaced by any larger parts. Two well-known examples are Carlitz and alternating compositions. We show that large parts have asymptotically geometric distributions. This leads to asymptotically independent Poisson variables for numbers of various large parts. Based on this we obtain asymptotic formulas for the probability of being gap free and for the expected values of the largest part, number of distinct parts and number of parts of multiplicity $k$, all accurate to $o(1)$.