English

Covering radius in the Hamming permutation space

Combinatorics 2020-04-30 v3

Abstract

Let Sn\mathcal{S}_n denote the set of permutations of {1,2,,n}\{1,2,\dots,n\}. The function f(n,s)f(n,s) is defined to be the minimum size of a subset SSnS\subseteq \mathcal{S}_n with the property that for any ρSn\rho\in \mathcal{S}_n there exists some σS\sigma\in S such that the Hamming distance between ρ\rho and σ\sigma is at most nsn-s. The value of f(n,2)f(n,2) is the subject of a conjecture by K\'ezdy and Snevily, which implies several famous conjectures about latin squares. We prove that the odd nn case of the K\'ezdy-Snevily Conjecture implies the whole conjecture. We also show that f(n,2)>3n/4f(n,2)>3n/4 for all nn, that s!<f(n,s)<3s!(ns)logns!< f(n,s)< 3s!(n-s)\log n for 1sn21\leq s\leq n-2 and that f(n,s)>2+2s22n2f(n,s)>\left\lfloor \frac{2+\sqrt{2s-2}}{2}\right\rfloor \frac{n}{2} if s3s\geq 3.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.09040,
  title  = {Covering radius in the Hamming permutation space},
  author = {Kevin Hendrey and Ian M. Wanless},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.09040},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

10 pages, 0 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:24:14.155Z