English

2-stack pushall sortable permutations

Discrete Mathematics 2013-03-20 v1 Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

In the 60's, Knuth introduced stack-sorting and serial compositions of stacks. In particular, one significant question arise out of the work of Knuth: how to decide efficiently if a given permutation is sortable with 2 stacks in series? Whether this problem is polynomial or NP-complete is still unanswered yet. In this article we introduce 2-stack pushall permutations which form a subclass of 2-stack sortable permutations and show that these two classes are closely related. Moreover, we give an optimal O(n^2) algorithm to decide if a given permutation of size n is 2-stack pushall sortable and describe all its sortings. This result is a step to the solve the general 2-stack sorting problem in polynomial time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1303.4376,
  title  = {2-stack pushall sortable permutations},
  author = {Adeline Pierrot and Dominique Rossin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.4376},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

41 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T23:43:59.860Z