Related papers: Average number of flips in pancake sorting

In this work, we consider the burnt pancake problem, which is a well-studied problem going back to a work of Gates and Papadimitriou from 1979.The problem is to sort a stack of~$n$ one-sided burnt pancakes of different sizes, by a sequence…

Using existing classification results for the 7- and 8-cycles in the pancake graph, we determine the number of permutations that require 4 pancake flips (prefix reversals) to be sorted. A similar characterization of the 8-cycles in the…

Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform…

Pancake flipping, a famous open problem in computer science, can be formalised as the problem of sorting a permutation of positive integers using as few prefix reversals as possible. In that context, a prefix reversal of length k reverses…

Burnt pancakes problem was defined by Gates and Papadimitriou in 1979. A stack $S$ of pancakes with a burnt side must be sorted by size, the smallest on top, and each pancake with burnt side down. The only operation allowed is to split…

The "pancake problem" asks how many prefix reversals are sufficient to sort any permutation $\pi \in \mathcal{S}_k$ to the identity. We write $f(k)$ to denote this quantity. The best known bounds are that $\frac{15}{14}k -O(1) \le f(k)\le…

We consider the problem of sorting elements on a series of stacks, introduced by Tarjan and Knuth. We improve the asymptotic lower bound for the number of stacks necessary to sort $n$ elements to $0.561 \log_2 n + O(1)$. This is the first…

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…

It is a long-standing open question to determine the minimum number of comparisons $S(n)$ that suffice to sort an array of $n$ elements. Indeed, before this work $S(n)$ has been known only for $n\leq 22$ with the exception for $n=16$, $17$,…

We prove that \Omega(n log(n)) comparisons are necessary for any quantum algorithm that sorts n numbers with high success probability and uses only comparisons. If no error is allowed, at least 0.110nlog_2(n) - 0.067n + O(1) comparisons…

A simple method to produce a random order type is to take the order type of a random point set. We conjecture that many probability distributions on order types defined in this way are heavily concentrated and therefore sample inefficiently…

We study sorting algorithms based on randomized round-robin comparisons. Specifically, we study Spin-the-bottle sort, where comparisons are unrestricted, and Annealing sort, where comparisons are restricted to a distance bounded by a…

We study searching and sorting in rounds motivated by a fair division question: given a cake cutting problem with $n$ players, compute a fair allocation in at most $k$ rounds of interaction with the players. Rounds interpolate between the…

The pancake problem is concerned with sorting a permutation (a stack of pancakes of different diameter) using only prefix reversals (spatula flips). Although the problem description belies simplicity, an exact formula for the maximum number…

In 2016, Bonato, Janssen, and Roshanbin introduced graph burning as a discrete process that models the spread of social contagion. Although the burning process is a simple algorithm, the problem of determining the least number of rounds…

Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we formalize the pile shuffle and investigate its capabilities as a sorting device. Our study is novel in that we consider pile shuffle in three…

In the online multiple knapsack problem, an algorithm faces a stream of items, and each item has to be either rejected or stored irrevocably in one of $n$ bins (knapsacks) of equal size. The gain of an~algorithm is equal to the sum of sizes…

We consider the problem of sorting $n$ elements subject to persistent random comparison errors. In this problem, each comparison between two elements can be wrong with some fixed (small) probability $p$, and comparing the same pair of…

We continue the study of selection and sorting of $n$ numbers under the adversarial comparator model, where comparisons can be adversarially tampered with if the arguments are sufficiently close. We derive a randomized sorting algorithm…

Flip-sort is a natural sorting procedure which raises fascinating combinatorial questions. It finds its roots in the seminal work of Knuth on stack-based sorting algorithms and leads to many links with permutation patterns. We present…