Related papers: Mind Switches in Futurama and Stargate
An episode of Futurama features a two-body mind-switching machine which will not work more than once on the same pair of bodies. After the Futurama community engages in a mind-switching spree, the question is asked, "Can the switching be…
The 2010 episode of \emph{Futurama} titled \emph{The Prisoner of Benda} centers around a machine that swaps the brains of any two people who use it. The problem is, once two people use the machine to swap brains with each other, they cannot…
The 2010 Futurama episode The Prisoner of Benda features a mind swapping machine that swaps the minds of two people at a time with the restriction that the same pair of people cannot use the machine more than once. We show that if a machine…
A permutation p is realized by the shift on N symbols if there is an infinite word on an N-letter alphabet whose successive left shifts by one position are lexicographically in the same relative order as p. The set of realized permutations…
We consider the problem of factoring permutations as a product of special types of transpositions, namely, those transpositions involving two positions with bounded distances. In particular, we investigate the minimum number, $\delta$, such…
A superpermutation on $n$ symbols is a string that contains each of the $n!$ permutations of the $n$ symbols as a contiguous substring. The shortest superpermutation on $n$ symbols was conjectured to have length $\sum_{i=1}^n i!$. The…
The number of minimal transitive star factorizations of a permutation was shown by Irving and Rattan to depend only on the conjugacy class of the permutation, a surprising result given that the pivot plays a very particular role in such…
Coupling $N$ large $m$ minimal models and flowing to IR fixed points is a systematic way to build new classes of compact unitary 2d CFTs which are likely to be irrational, and potentially have a positive Virasoro twist gap above the…
We introduce a new approach to an enumerative problem closely linked with the geometry of branched coverings; that is, we study the number of ways a permutation can be decomposed into a product of a given number of 2-cycles, 3-cycles, etc.…
We give a compact expression for the number of factorizations of any permutation into a minimal number of transpositions of the form $(1 i)$. Our result generalizes earlier work of Pak in which substantial restrictions were placed on the…
We show interaction between high- and low-frequency modes in periodic $\alpha$-FPU chains with alternating large masses. The treatment discusses the difficult case where the number of particles $N=2p$ involves $p$ prime. A key role is…
We characterize the minimum-length sequences of independent lazy simple transpositions whose composition is a uniformly random permutation. For every reduced word of the reverse permutation there is exactly one valid way to assign…
An infinite permutation is a linear ordering of the set of non-negative integers. Generally, the properties of infinite permutations analogous to those of infinite words show some resemblances and some differences between permutations and…
We examine the open problem of finding the shortest string that contains each of the n! permutations of n symbols as contiguous substrings (i.e., the shortest superpermutation on n symbols). It has been conjectured that the shortest…
Any permutation in the finite symmetric group can be written as a product of simple transpositions $s_i = (i~i+1)$. For a fixed permutation $\sigma \in \mathfrak{S}_n$ the products of minimal length are called reduced decompositions or…
We give two combinatorial proofs of Goulden and Jackson's formula for the number of minimal transitive factorizations of a permutation when the permutation has two cycles. We use the recent result of Goulden, Nica, and Oancea on the number…
A permutation array $A$ is a set of permutations on a finite set $\Omega$, say of size $n$. Given distinct permutations $\pi, \sigma\in \Omega$, we let $hd(\pi, \sigma) = |\{ x\in \Omega: \pi(x) \ne \sigma(x) \}|$, called the Hamming…
The subject of this paper is a simulation to that in [1] but here we consider substitutions corresponding to transpositions instead of replacements.
Spin fluctuations represent the lowest established energy scale in cuprates and are crucial for the understanding of anomalous normal state properties and superconductivity in these materials. The memory-function approach to the spin…
We study random typical minimal factorizations of the $n$-cycle into transpositions, which are factorizations of $(1, \ldots,n)$ as a product of $n-1$ transpositions. By viewing transpositions as chords of the unit disk and by reading them…