Related papers: Pancake Flipping with Two Spatulas
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
We consider a stack sorting algorithm where only the appropriate output values are popped from the stack and then any remaining entries in the stack are run through the stack in reverse order. We identify the basis for the $2$-reverse pass…
Semisort is a fundamental algorithmic primitive widely used in the design and analysis of efficient parallel algorithms. It takes input as an array of records and a function extracting a \emph{key} per record, and reorders them so that…
Large-alphabet strings are common in scenarios such as information retrieval and natural-language processing. The efficient storage and processing of such strings usually introduces several challenges that are not witnessed in…
Constructing accurate and automatic solvers of math word problems has proven to be quite challenging. Prior attempts using machine learning have been trained on corpora specific to math word problems to produce arithmetic expressions in…
Given string $S[1..N]$ and integer $k$, the {\em suffix selection} problem is to determine the $k$th lexicographically smallest amongst the suffixes $S[i... N]$, $1 \leq i \leq N$. We study the suffix selection problem in the cache-aware…
In the permutation inversion problem, the task is to find the preimage of some challenge value, given oracle access to the permutation. This is a fundamental problem in query complexity, and appears in many contexts, particularly…
In 1937, biologists Sturtevant and Tan posed a computational question: transform a chromosome represented by a permutation of genes, into a second permutation, using a minimum-length sequence of reversals, each inverting the order of a…
We introduce a variation of the scheduling with precedence constraints problem that has applications to molecular folding and production management. We are given a bipartite graph $H=(B,S)$. Vertices in $B$ are thought of as goods or…
Reordering poses a major challenge in machine translation (MT) between two languages with significant differences in word order. In this paper, we present a novel reordering approach utilizing sparse features based on dependency word pairs.…
We study a family of maps from $S_n \to S_n$ we call fixed point homing shuffles. These maps generalize a few known problems such as Conway's Topswops, and a card shuffling process studied by Gweneth McKinley. We show that the iterates of…
Multilayer transformer networks consist of interleaved self-attention and feedforward sublayers. Could ordering the sublayers in a different pattern lead to better performance? We generate randomly ordered transformers and train them with…
In comparative genomics, a transposition is an operation that exchanges two consecutive sequences of genes in a genome. The transposition distance, that is, the minimum number of transpositions needed to transform a genome into another, is,…
The \emph{generalized sorting problem} is a restricted version of standard comparison sorting where we wish to sort $n$ elements but only a subset of pairs are allowed to be compared. Formally, there is some known graph $G = (V, E)$ on the…
We collect open problems in permutation patterns on four themes: rank-unimodality in the permutation pattern poset, Wilf-equivalence and shape-Wilf-equivalence, the enumeration of derangements in permutation classes, and sorting by stacks…
We address the problem of computing distances between rankings that take into account similarities between candidates. The need for evaluating such distances is governed by applications as diverse as rank aggregation, bioinformatics, social…
In this expository article, we highlight the direct connection between card shuffling and the functions known as $P$-partitions that come from algebraic combinatorics. While many (but not all) of the results we discuss are known, we give a…
We consider the problem of fairly dividing a two dimensional heterogeneous good among multiple players. Applications include division of land as well as ad space in print and electronic media. Classical cake cutting protocols primarily…
We present a deterministic comparison-based algorithm that sorts sequences avoiding a fixed permutation $\pi$ in linear time, even if $\pi$ is a priori unkown. Moreover, the dependence of the multiplicative constant on the pattern $\pi$…
The bottom-left algorithm is a simple heuristic for the Strip Packing Problem. It places the rectangles in the given order at the lowest free position in the strip, using the left most position in case of ties. Despite its simplicity, the…