Related papers: Average number of flips in pancake sorting
We revisit the well-known problem of sorting under partial information: sort a finite set given the outcomes of comparisons between some pairs of elements. The input is a partially ordered set P, and solving the problem amounts to…
Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…
We study a Faulty Congested Clique model, in which an adversary may fail nodes in the network throughout the computation. We show that any task of $O(n\log{n})$-bit input per node can be solved in roughly $n$ rounds, where $n$ is the size…
Given a distributed network represented by a weighted undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ on $n$ vertices, and a parameter $k$, we devise a distributed algorithm that computes a routing scheme in $(n^{1/2+1/k}+D)\cdot n^{o(1)}$ rounds, where $D$ is…
Several sports tournaments contain a round-robin group stage where the teams are assigned to groups subject to some constraints. Hence, the organisers usually use a computer-assisted random draw to avoid any dead end, a situation when the…
We analyze the competitive ratio and the advice complexity of the online unbounded knapsack problem. An instance is given as a sequence of n items with a size and a value each, and an algorithm has to decide how often to pack each item into…
A sorting network is a shortest path from 12...n to n...21 in the Cayley graph of S_n generated by nearest-neighbor swaps. For m<=n, consider the random m-particle sorting network obtained by choosing an n-particle sorting network uniformly…
We prove that any exact quantum algorithm searching an ordered list of N elements requires more than \frac{1}{\pi}(\ln(N)-1) queries to the list. This improves upon the previously best known lower bound of {1/12}\log_2(N) - O(1). Our proof…
We study a problem motivated by a question related to quantum-error-correcting codes. Combinatorially, it involves the following graph parameter: $$f(G)=\min\set{|A|+|\{x\in V\setminus A : d_A(x)\text{is odd}\}| : A\neq\emptyset},$$ where…
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we continue the study of a prequel paper on the pile shuffle and its capabilities as a sorting device. We study two sort feasibility problems of…
We show that several versions of Floyd and Rivest's algorithm Select for finding the $k$th smallest of $n$ elements require at most $n+\min\{k,n-k\}+o(n)$ comparisons on average and with high probability. This rectifies the analysis of…
We consider the setting of online computation with advice, and study the bin packing problem and a number of scheduling problems. We show that it is possible, for any of these problems, to arbitrarily approach a competitive ratio of $1$…
The importance of classifying connections in large graphs has been the motivation for a rich line of work on distributed subgraph finding that has led to exciting recent breakthroughs. A crucial aspect that remained open was whether…
Recently Wilson [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14 (2004) 274--325] introduced an important new technique for lower bounding the mixing time of a Markov chain. In this paper we extend Wilson's technique to find lower bounds of the correct order for…
We use a method for determining the number of preimages of any permutation under the stack-sorting map in order to obtain recursive upper bounds for the numbers $W_t(n)$ and $W_t(n,k)$ of $t$-stack sortable permutations of length $n$ and…
We consider the following general model of a sorting procedure: we fix a hereditary permutation class $\mathcal{C}$, which corresponds to the operations that the procedure is allowed to perform in a single step. The input of sorting is a…
Consider a randomly shuffled deck of $2n$ cards with $n$ red cards and $n$ black cards. We study the average number of moves it takes to go from a randomly shuffled deck to a deck that alternates in color by performing the following move:…
Generalized sorting problem, also known as sorting with forbidden comparisons, was first introduced by Huang et al. together with a randomized algorithm which requires $\tilde O(n^{3/2})$ probes. We study this problem with additional…
We use computational experiments to find the rectangles of minimum perimeter into which a given number n of non-overlapping congruent circles can be packed. No assumption is made on the shape of the rectangles. In many of the packings…
For any $\Delta$, let $k_\Delta$ be the maximum integer $k$ such that $(k+1)(k+2)\le \Delta$. We give a distributed \LOCAL algorithm that, given an integer $k < k_\Delta$, computes a valid $\Delta-k$-coloring if one exists. The algorithm…