English

Permutations generated by a depth 2 and infinite stack in series are algebraic

Combinatorics 2014-08-05 v2

Abstract

We prove that the class of permutations generated by passing an ordered sequence 12n12\dots n through a stack of depth 2 and an infinite stack in series is in bijection with an unambiguous context-free language, where a permutation of length nn is encoded by a string of length 3n3n. It follows that the sequence counting the number of permutations of each length has an algebraic generating function. We use the explicit context-free language to compute the generating function: \begin{align*} \sum_{n\geq 0} c_n t^n &= \frac{(1+q)\left(1+5q-q^2-q^3-(1-q)\sqrt{(1-q^2)(1-4q-q^2)}\right)}{8q} \end{align*} where cnc_n is the number of permutations of length nn that can be generated, and qq(t)=12t14t2tq \equiv q(t) = \frac{1-2t-\sqrt{1-4t}}{2t} is a simple variant of the Catalan generating function. This in turn implies that cn1/n2+25c_n^{1/n} \to 2+2\sqrt{5}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1407.4248,
  title  = {Permutations generated by a depth 2 and infinite stack in series are algebraic},
  author = {Murray Elder and Geoffrey Lee and Andrew Rechnitzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.4248},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

21 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:05:13.364Z