Related papers: On Sorting by Bounded Block Interchanges
We consider the offline sorting buffer problem. The input is a sequence of items of different types. All items must be processed one by one by a server. The server is equipped with a random-access buffer of limited capacity which can be…
In connection with machine arithmetic, we are interested in systems of constraints of the form x + k \leq y + k'. Over integers, the satisfiability problem for such systems is polynomial time. The problem becomes NP complete if we restrict…
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…
List colouring is an NP-complete decision problem even if the total number of colours is three. It is hard even on planar bipartite graphs. We give a polynomial-time algorithm for solving list colouring of permutation graphs with a bounded…
Motivated by the study of genome rearrangements, the NP-hard Minimum Common String Partition problems asks, given two strings, to split both strings into an identical set of blocks. We consider an extension of this problem to unbalanced…
Genome rearrangements are events where large blocks of DNA exchange places during evolution. The analysis of these events is a promising tool for understanding evolutionary genomics, providing data for phylogenetic reconstruction based on…
String matching is the problem of deciding whether a given $n$-bit string contains a given $k$-bit pattern. We study the complexity of this problem in three settings. Communication complexity. For small $k$, we provide near-optimal upper…
We study the token swapping problem, in which we are given a graph with an initial assignment of one distinct token to each vertex, and a final desired assignment (again with one token per vertex). The goal is to find the minimum length…
There are several approaches to study occurrences of consecutive patterns in permutations such as the inclusion-exclusion method, the tree representations of permutations, the spectral approach and others. We propose yet another approach to…
We explore the clearing problem in the barter exchange market. The problem, described in the terminology of graph theory, is to find a set of vertex-disjoint, length-restricted cycles that maximize the total weight in a weighted digraph.…
In this article, we give a polynomial algorithm to decide whether a given permutation $\sigma$ is sortable with two stacks in series. This is indeed a longstanding open problem which was first introduced by Knuth. He introduced the stack…
The problem of ranking can be described as follows. We have a set of combinatorial objects $S$, such as, say, the k-subsets of n things, and we can imagine that they have been arranged in some list, say lexicographically, and we want to…
We investigate the complexity of finding a transformation from a given spanning tree in a graph to another given spanning tree in the same graph via a sequence of edge flips. The exchange property of the matroid bases immediately yields…
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…
The problems of Permutation Routing via Matching and Token Swapping are reconfiguration problems on graphs. This paper is concerned with the complexity of those problems and a colored variant. For a given graph where each vertex has a…
The list coloring problem is a variation of the classical vertex coloring problem, extensively studied in recent years, where each vertex has a restricted list of allowed colors, and having some variations as the $(\gamma,\mu)$-coloring,…
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…
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.
An algorithm is presented for unranking permutations in transposition order: Given a seed s\in N, the algorithm produces a permutation P(s) that differs from the permutation P(s+1) by the transposition of two elements.
Let $k$ be a nonnegative integer, and let $\alpha$ and $\beta$ be two permutations of $n$ symbols. We say that $\alpha$ and $\beta$ $k$-commute if $H(\alpha\beta, \beta\alpha)=k$, where $H$ denotes the Hamming metric between permutations.…