Related papers: Sorting a Permutation by block moves
We consider the problem of upper bounding the number of circular transpositions needed to sort a permutation. It is well known that any permutation can be sorted using at most $n(n-1)/2$ adjacent transpositions. We show that, if we allow…
We consider the problem of determining the maximum number of moves required to sort a permutation of $[n]$ using cut-and-paste operations, in which a segment is cut out and then pasted into the remaining string, possibly reversed. We give…
We initiate the study of sorting permutations using prefix block-interchanges, which exchange any prefix of a permutation with another non-intersecting interval. The goal is to transform a given permutation into the identity permutation…
We use an interesting result of probabilistic flavor concerning the product of two permutations consisting of one cycle each to find an explicit formula for the average number of block interchanges needed to sort a permutation of length…
In this work, we consider a restricted case of the well studied Sorting by Block Interchanges problem. We put an upper bound k on the length of the blocks (substrings) to be interchanged at each step. We call the problem Sorting by k-Block…
We determine the maximal number of steps required to sort $n$ labeled points on a circle by adjacent swaps. Lower bounds for sorting by all swaps, not necessarily adjacent, are given as well.
We provide an upper bound on the number of ordered Reidemeister moves required to pass between two diagrams of the same link. This bound is in terms of the number of unordered Reidemeister moves required.
We obtain an upper and lower bound for the number of reduced words for a permutation in terms of the number of braid classes and the number of commutation classes of the permutation. We classify the permutations that achieve each of these…
We continue the study of Adin, Alon and Roichman [arXiv:2502.14398, 2025] on the number of steps required to sort $n$ labelled points on a circle by transpositions. Imagine that the vertices of a cycle of length $n$ are labelled by the…
In sorting situations where the final destination of each item is known, it is natural to repeatedly choose items and place them where they belong, allowing the intervening items to shift by one to make room. (In fact, a special case of…
Consider a finite sequence of permutations of the elements 1,...,n, with the property that each element changes its position by at most 1 from any permutation to the next. We call such a sequence a tangle, and we define a move of element i…
We study a sorting machine consisting of two stacks in series where the first stack has the added restriction such that entries in the stack must be in decreasing order from top to bottom. We give the basis of the class of permutations that…
The poset of permutations of [n] under Bruhat ordering is studied. We give nontrivial upper and lower bounds for the number of comparable pairs of permutations in both the weak and strong versions of this order. In light of numerical…
We study sorting by queues that can rearrange their content by applying permutations from a predefined set. These new sorting devices are called shuffle queues and we investigate those of them corresponding to sets of permutations defining…
We use stack words to find a new, simple proof for the best known upper bound for the number of 3-stack sortable permutations of a given length. This is the first time that stack words are used to obtain such a result.
In this paper we prove new lower bounds for the maximal size of permutation codes by connecting the theory of permutation codes with the theory of linear block codes. More specifically, using the columns of a parity check matrix of an…
We prove an upper bound for the number of cyclic transitive subgroups in a finite permutation group and clarify the structure of the groups for which this bound becomes sharp. We also give an application in the theory of number fields.
We introduce a new sorting device for permutations which makes use of a pop stack augmented with a bypass operation. This results in a sorting machine, which is more powerful than the usual Popstacksort algorithm and seems to have never…
We introduce an algorithm to determine when a sorting operation, such as stack-sort or bubble-sort, outputs a given pattern. The algorithm provides a new proof of the description of West-2-stack-sortable permutations, that is permutations…
We investigate permutations in terms of their cycle structure and descent set. To do this, we generalize the classical bijection of Gessel and Reutenauer to deal with permutations that have some ascending and some descending blocks. We then…