Related papers: Average length of the longest $k$-alternating subs…

The expected length of longest common subsequences is a problem that has been in the literature for at least twenty five years. Determining the limiting constants \gamma_k appears to be quite difficult, and the current best bounds leave…

In this paper we define a new problem, motivated by computational biology, $LCSk$ aiming at finding the maximal number of $k$ length $substrings$, matching in both input strings while preserving their order of appearance. The traditional…

We use an interesting result of probabilistic flavor concerning the product of two permutations consisting of one cycle each to find an explicit formula for the average number of block interchanges needed to sort a permutation of length…

A long standing open conjecture states that if a link $\mathcal{K}$ is alternating, then its ropelength $L(\mathcal{K})$ is at least of the order $O(Cr(\mathcal{K}))$. A recent result shows that the maximum braid index of a link bounds the…

The longest increasing subsequence of a random walk with mean zero and finite variance is known to be $n^{1/2 + o(1)}$. We show that this is not universal for symmetric random walks. In particular, the symmetric Ultra-fat tailed random walk…

Let $R(n,k)$ denote the number of permutations of ${1,2,...,n}$ with $k$ alternating runs. In this note we present an explicit formula for the numbers $R(n,k)$.

Let $(X_n)_{n\ge 0}$ be an irreducible, aperiodic, and homogeneous binary Markov chain and let $LI_n$ be the length of the longest (weakly) increasing subsequence of $(X_k)_{1\le k \le n}$. Using combinatorial constructions and weak…

Consider a random permutation of $kn$ objects that permutes $n$ disjoint blocks of size $k$ and then permutes elements within each block. Normalizing its cycle lengths by $kn$ gives a random partition of unity, and we derive the limit law…

We study the average edit distance between two random strings. More precisely, we adapt a technique introduced by Lueker in the context of the average longest common subsequence of two random strings to improve the known upper bound on the…

In the longest common substring problem, we are given two strings of length $n$ and must find a substring of maximal length that occurs in both strings. It is well known that the problem can be solved in linear time, but the solution is not…

The authors consider the length, $l_N$, of the length of the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation of $N$ numbers. The main result in this paper is a proof that the distribution function for $l_N$, suitably centered 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…

If the edges of the complete graph $K_n$ are totally ordered, a simple path whose edges are in ascending order is called increasing. The worst-case length of the longest increasing path has remained an open problem for several decades, with…

Let $[n]=\{1, \ldots, n\}$. A sequence $u=a_1a_2\dots a_l$ over $[n]$ is called $k$-sparse if $a_i = a_j$, $i > j$ implies $i-j\geq k$. In other words, every consecutive subsequence of $u$ of length at most $k$ does not have letters in…

We find a two term asymptotic expansion for the optimal expected value of a sequentially selected monotone subsequence from a random permutation of length n. A striking feature of this expansion is that tells us that the expected value of…

We provide a complete characterisation of automaticity of uniformly recurrent substitutive sequences in terms of the incidence matrix of the return substitution of the underlying purely substitutive sequence. This resolves a recent question…

We extend Friedman's theorem to show that, for any fixed $r>1$, a random $2r$--regular Schreier graph associated with the action of $r$ uniformly random permutations of $[n]$ on $k_{n}$--tuples of distinct elements in $[n]$ has a…

Examples are constructed of sparse subsequences of the integers for which the associated maximal averages operator is of weak type (1,1). A consequence, by transference, is that an almost everywhere L^1 -- type ergodic theorem holds for…

We extend Stanley's work on alternating permutations with extremal number of fixed points in two directions: first, alternating permutations are replaced by permutations with a prescribed descent set; second, instead of simply counting…

As a refinement of the celebrated recent work of Yitang Zhang we show that any admissible k-tuple of integers contains at least two primes and almost primes in each component infinitely often if k is at least 181000. This implies that there…