Related papers: An Improved Lower Bound for Stack Sorting
In the study of extensions of polytopes of combinatorial optimization problems, a notorious open question is that for the size of the smallest extended formulation of the Minimum Spanning Tree problem on a complete graph with $n$ nodes. The…
At the end of the 1960s, Knuth characterised the permutations that can be sorted using a stack in terms of forbidden patterns. He also showed that they are in bijection with Dyck paths and thus counted by the Catalan numbers. Subsequently,…
We study the problem of truthfully scheduling $m$ tasks to $n$ selfish unrelated machines, under the objective of makespan minimization, as was introduced in the seminal work of Nisan and Ronen [STOC'99]. Closing the current gap of…
We consider NCA labeling schemes: given a rooted tree $T$, label the nodes of $T$ with binary strings such that, given the labels of any two nodes, one can determine, by looking only at the labels, the label of their nearest common…
Some of the most important open problems for linear layouts of graphs ask for the relation between a graph's queue number and its stack number or mixed number. In such, we seek a vertex order and edge partition of $G$ into parts with…
We consider the following problem: given an unsorted array of $n$ elements, and a sequence of intervals in the array, compute the median in each of the subarrays defined by the intervals. We describe a simple algorithm which uses O(n) space…
A fork stack is a generalised stack which allows pushes and pops of several items at a time. We consider the problem of determining which input streams can be sorted using a single forkstack, or dually, which permutations of a fixed input…
The element distinctness problem takes as input a list $I$ of $n$ values from a totally ordered universe and the goal is to decide whether $I$ contains any duplicates. It is a well-studied problem with a classical worst-case $\Omega(n \log…
Sorting networks are oblivious sorting algorithms with many practical applications and rich theoretical properties. Propositional encodings of sorting networks are a key tool for proving concrete bounds on the minimum number of comparators…
We give new approximation algorithms for the submodular joint replenishment problem and the inventory routing problem, using an iterative rounding approach. In both problems, we are given a set of $N$ items and a discrete time horizon of…
We present a $\lg n + 2 \lg \lg n+3$ ancestry labeling scheme for trees. The problem was first presented by Kannan et al. [STOC 88'] along with a simple $2 \lg n$ solution. Motivated by applications to XML files, the label size was improved…
It is known that the size of the largest common subtree (i.e., the maximum agreement subtree) of two independent random binary trees with $n$ given labeled leaves is of order between $n^{0.366}$ and $n^{1/2}$. We improve the lower bound to…
We find a searching method on ordered lists that surprisingly outperforms binary searching with respect to average query complexity while retaining minmax optimality. The method is shown to require $O(\log_2\log_2 n)$ queries on average…
We investigate how sorting algorithms efficiently overcome the exponential size of the permutation space. Our main contribution is a new continuous-time formulation of sorting as a gradient flow on the permutohedron, yielding an independent…
We improve the lower bound for the classical exponent of approximation $w_{n}^{\ast}(\xi)$ connected to Wirsing's famous problem of approximation to real numbers by algebraic numbers of degree at most $n$. Our bound exceeds…
A sorting network is a shortest path from 12...n to n...21 in the Cayley graph of S_n generated by nearest-neighbour swaps. We prove that for a uniform random sorting network, as n->infinity the space-time process of swaps converges to the…
In 1968, Liu described the problem of securing documents in a shared secret project. In an example, at least six out of eleven participating scientists need to be present to open the lock securing the secret documents. Shamir proposed a…
An open problem that is widely regarded as one of the most important in quantum query complexity is to resolve the quantum query complexity of the k-distinctness function on inputs of size N. While the case of k=2 (also called Element…
Motivated by many applications, we study clustering with a faulty oracle. In this problem, there are $n$ items belonging to $k$ unknown clusters, and the algorithm is allowed to ask the oracle whether two items belong to the same cluster or…
One of the most basic computational problems is the task of finding a desired item in an ordered list of N items. While the best classical algorithm for this problem uses log_2 N queries to the list, a quantum computer can solve the problem…