Optimizing alphabet reduction pairs of arrays

In our earlier paper, "2 CSPs all are approximable within a constant differential factor" (ISCO 2018, LNCS 10856), we introduced a family of combinatorial designs called 'alphabet reduction pairs of arrays' (ARPAs). These designs are parameterized by three integers $q,p,k$, with $p\leq q$ and $k\leq p$: $q$ is the size of the alphabet from which the arrays draw their entries; $p$ is the maximum number of distinct symbols allowed in a row of the second array; $k$ is the largest integer for which the two arrays coincide -- up to row permutations -- on any $k$-element subset of their columns. The first array must contain at least one occurrence of the word $0\ 1 \cdots\ q-1$ as a row. The idea is to cover as many occurrences of this word as possible using as few words as possible, each containing at most $p$ distinct symbols.
ARPAs are related to the approximability of constraint satisfaction problems with bounded constraint arity ($k$-CSPs). In this context, we are particularly interested in ARPAs that maximize the frequency of the word $0\ 1 \cdots\ q-1$. We call such ARPAs 'optimal' and study them in this paper. To this end, we introduce a simpler family of combinatorial designs called 'Cover pairs of arrays' (CPAs), which can be viewed as partially defined ARPAs with Boolean entries. We prove that ARPAs and CPAs are equivalent with respect to maximizing the frequency of their target word. As a corollary of our proof, computing the frequency of the target word in optimal ARPAs reduces to solving a linear program in $q + p + 1$ continuous variables and $k + 1$ constraints. We also prove the optimality of previously known ARPAs for $p=k$ and provide optimal ARPAs for $k=1$ and $k=2$.