How many binary strings of length 10 are there that don't contain either of the substrings 101 or 010?
I've tried doing some casework, thinking that there wouldn't be too many cases, but it didn't work. I split my cases up into 1) string begins with 1 and 2) string begins with 0.
Casework might not be the best option here. I think an ideal method to solve this would involve some sort of recursion, but I'm not sure where I should start.
On
Given a binary string, $b$, whose length is $n$, define a new binary string $b'$, as follows. The length of $b'$ is $n-1$, and for all $k\in \{1,\dots,n-1\}$, $$ b'_k=\begin{cases} 1 & \text{if }b_k\neq b_{k+1} \\ 0 & \text{if }b_k=b_{k+1} \end{cases} $$ $b'$ is like the "derivative" of $b$, because $b'$ records the change between adjacent entries of $b$ (0 for no change, 1 for a change).
Lemma 1: Let $n\ge 1$. Let $B$ be a binary string of length $n-1$. There exist exactly two binary strings, $b$, of length $n$, for which $b'=B$.
Lemma 2: Let $b$ be a binary string of length $n$, where $n\ge 1$. Then $b$ contains one of the substrings $101$ or $010$ if and only if $b'$ contains the substring $11$.
Let $a_n$ be the number of binary strings of length $n$ which avoid $101$ and $010$.
Let $a_n'$ be the number of binary strings of length $n$ which avoid $11$.
These two lemmas imply
$$
a_n=2a_{n-1}',\qquad (n\ge 1)
$$
All you need to do is compute what $a_{n-1}$ is. Counting binary strings without two adjacent ones is a well-known problem.
On
Here we derive a recurrence relation. We count the number $a_n$ of wanted strings of length $n$ from the set $\mathcal{V}=\{0,1\}$, i.e. binary strings of length $n$ which do not contain a bad word from $\mathcal{B}=\{010,101\}$.
We do so by partition them according to their matching length with the initial parts of a string of length $2$. We consider for $n\geq 2$: \begin{align*} \color{blue}{a_n=a^{[00]}_n+a^{[01]}_n+a^{[10]}_n+a^{[11]}_n}\tag{1} \end{align*}
The number $a^{[00]}_n$ counts the number of valid strings of length $n$ which start with $\color{blue}{00}$ from the left.
The number $a^{[01]}_n$ counts the number of valid strings of length $n$ which start with $\color{blue}{01}$ from the left.
The number $a^{[10]}_n$ counts the number of valid strings of length $n$ which start with $\color{blue}{10}$ from the left.
The number $a^{[11]}_n$ counts the number of valid strings of length $n$ which start with $\color{blue}{11}$ from the left.
We derive a relationship between valid strings of length $n$ with those of length $n+1$ as follows:
If a string counted by $a^{[00]}_n$ is appended
by $0$ from the left it contributes to $a^{[00]}_{n+1}$.
If it is appended by $1$ from the left it contributes to $a^{[10]}_{n+1}$.
If a string counted by $a^{[01]}_n$ is appended
by $0$ from the left it contributes to $a^{[00]}_{n+1}$.
Appending from the left by $1$ is not allowed since then we have an invalid string starting with $\color{blue}{101}$.
If a string counted by $a^{[10]}_n$ is appended
by $1$ from the left it contributes to $a^{[11]}_{n+1}$.
Appending from the left by $0$ is not allowed since then we have an invalid string starting with $\color{blue}{010}$.
If a string counted by $a^{[11]}_n$ is appended
by $0$ from the left it contributes to $a^{[01]}_{n+1}$.
If it is appended by $1$ from the left it contributes to $a^{[11]}_{n+1}$.
These relationships can be written as \begin{align*} \color{blue}{a^{[00]}_{n+1}}&\color{blue}{=a^{[00]}_{n}+a^{[01]}_{n}}\tag{2}\\ \color{blue}{a^{[01]}_{n+1}}&\color{blue}{=a^{[11]}_n}\tag{3}\\ \color{blue}{a^{[10]}_{n+1}}&\color{blue}{=a^{[00]}_n}\tag{4}\\ \color{blue}{a^{[11]}_{n+1}}&\color{blue}{=a^{[10]}_n+a^{[11]}_n}\tag{5}\\ \end{align*}
We can now derive a recurrence relation from (1) - (5). We obtain for $n\geq 2$: \begin{align*} \color{blue}{a_{n+1}}&=a^{[00]}_{n+1}+a^{[01]}_{n+1}+a^{[10]}_{n+1}+a^{[11]}_{n+1}\tag{$ \to (1)$}\\ &=\left(a^{[00]}_{n}+a^{[01]}_{n}\right)+a^{[11]}_{n}+a^{[00]}_{n} +\left(a^{[10]}_{n}+a^{[11]}_{n}\right)\tag{$\to (2),(3),(4),(5)$}\\ &=2a^{[00]}_{n}+a^{[01]}_{n}+2a^{[11]}_{n}+a^{[10]}_{n}\\ &=a_n+a^{[00]}_{n}+a^{[11]}_{n}\tag{$ \to (1)$}\\ &=a_n+\left(a^{[00]}_{n-1}+a^{[01]}_{n-1}\right)+\left(a^{[10]}_{n-1}+a^{[11]}_{n-1}\right)\tag{$ \to (2),(5)$}\\ &\,\,\color{blue}{=a_n+a_{n-1}}\tag{$\to (1)$} \end{align*}
We derive the wanted recurrence relation for $a_n$ as \begin{align*} \color{blue}{a_{n+1}}&\color{blue}{=a_{n}+a_{n-1}\qquad\qquad n\geq 2}\tag{6}\\ \color{blue}{a_0}&\color{blue}{=1}\\ \color{blue}{a_1}&\color{blue}{=2}\\ \color{blue}{a_2}&\color{blue}{=4}\\ \end{align*} where we set $a_0=1$ for the empty string and $a_1=2$ and $a_2=4$ according to the number of valid strings of length $1$ and length $2$.
We can now find the wanted number $a_{10}$ iteratively by calculating \begin{align*} a_3&=a_2+a_1=6\\ a_4&=a_3+a_2=10\\ a_5&=a_4+a_3=16\\ a_6&=a_5+a_4=26\\ a_7&=a_6+a_5=42\\ a_8&=a_7+a_6=68\\ a_9&=a_8+a_7=110\\ \color{blue}{a_{10}}&\,\,\color{blue}{ =a_9+a_8=178} \end{align*}
in accordance with the coefficients of the series expansion of $f$ in another answer.
This answer is based upon the Goulden-Jackson Cluster Method, a generating function method encoding PIE, the principle of inclusion-exclusion. We consider the set of words of length $n\geq 0$ built from an alphabet $$\mathcal{V}=\{0,1\}$$ and the set $B=\{010,101\}$ of bad words which are not allowed to be part of the words we are looking for. We derive a generating function $f(s)$ with the coefficient of $s^n$ being the number of wanted words of length $n$.
According to the paper (p.7) the generating function $f(s)$ is \begin{align*} \color{blue}{f(s)=\frac{1}{1-ds-\text{weight}(\mathcal{C})}}\tag{1} \end{align*} with $d=|\mathcal{V}|=2$, the size of the alphabet and $\mathcal{C}$ being the weight-numerator of bad words with \begin{align*} \text{weight}(\mathcal{C})=\text{weight}(\mathcal{C}[010])+\text{weight}(\mathcal{C}[101])\tag{2} \end{align*}
The additional terms on the right-hand side of (3) take account of the overlapping of $01\color{blue}{0}$ with $\color{blue}{0}10$ and of $0\color{blue}{10}$ with $\color{blue}{10}1$ and similarly in (4). Solving the linear equations in the unknowns $\text{weight}(\mathcal{C}[010])$ and $\text{weight}(\mathcal{C}[101])$ in (3) and (4) gives \begin{align*} \text{weight}(\mathcal{C}[010])=\text{weight}(\mathcal{C}[101])=-s^3\frac{1+s-s^2}{1+2s+s^2-s^4} \end{align*} from which according to (1) and (2) \begin{align*} \color{blue}{f(s)}&=\frac{1}{1-ds-\text{weight}(\mathcal{C})}\\ &=\frac{1}{1-2s+2s^3\frac{1+s-s^2}{1+2s+s^2-s^4}}\\ &\,\,\color{blue}{=\frac{1+s+s^2}{1-s-s^2}} \end{align*} follows. Series expansion of $f$ at $s=0$ gives \begin{align*} f(s)&=\frac{1+s+s^2}{1-s-s^2}\\ &=1 + 2 s + 4 s^2 + 6 s^3 + 10 s^4 + 16s^5+26s^6\\ &\qquad + 42 s^7+68s^8+110s^9 + \color{blue}{178} s^{10} + 288s^{11} +\cdots \end{align*} where the last line was calculated with the help of Wolfram Alpha.
Result: The blue marked coefficient of $s^{10}$ shows there are $\color{blue}{178}$ words of length $10$ over the alphabet $\mathcal{V}$ which do not contain $010$ or $101$.