Related papers: Shuffled equi-n-squares
We consider the tiling of an $n$-board (a $1\times n$ array of square cells of unit width) with half-squares ($\frac12\times1$ tiles) and $(\frac12,\frac12)$-fence tiles. A $(\frac12,\frac12)$-fence tile is composed of two half-squares…
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
We define and investigate a family of permutations matrices, called shuffling matrices, acting on a set of $N=n_1\cdots n_m$ elements, where $m\geq 2$ and $n_i\geq 2$ for any $i=1,\ldots, m$. These elements are identified with the vertices…
A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…
A chessboard has the property that every row and every column has as many white squares as black squares. In this mostly methodological note, we address the problem of counting such rectangular arrays with a fixed (numeric) number of rows,…
In 1975, Stein made a wide generalisation of the Ryser-Brualdi-Stein conjecture on transversals in Latin squares, conjecturing that every equi-$n$-square (an $n\times n$ array filled with $n$ symbols where each symbol appears exactly $n$…
The ``overlapping-cycles shuffle'' mixes a deck of $n$ cards by moving either the $n$th card or the $(n-k)$th card to the top of the deck, with probability half each. We determine the spectral gap for the location of a single card, which,…
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:…
We introduce a new type of card shuffle called one-sided transpositions. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a random walk on the symmetric…
The shuffle of a non-empty countable set $ S $ of linear orders is the (unique up to isomorphism) linear order $ \Xi(S) $ obtained by fixing a coloring function $ \chi: \mathbb{Q} \to S $ having fibers dense in $ \mathbb{Q} $ and replacing…
Magic squares have been an enthralling topic in mathematics for centuries. They are formed by filling in all the cells of a square matrix with the numbers starting from one so that the sum of all rows, columns, and diagonals is the same.…
We show that any permutation of ${1,2,...,N}$ can be written as the product of two involutions. As a consequence, any permutation of the elements of an array can be performed in-place in parallel in time O(1). In the case where the…
In card-based cryptography, a deck of physical cards is used to achieve secure computation. A shuffle, which randomly permutes a card-sequence along with some probability distribution, ensures the security of a card-based protocol. The…
A magic SET square is a 3 by 3 table of SET cards such that each row, column, diagonal, and anti-diagonal is a set. We allow the following transformations of the square: shuffling features, shuffling values within the features, rotations…
A \emph{magic square} is an $n \times n$ array of distinct positive integers whose sum along any row, column, or main diagonal is the same number. We compute the number of such squares for $n=4$, as a function of either the magic sum or an…
We study sorting by queues that can rearrange their content by applying permutations from a predefined set. These new sorting devices are called shuffle queues and we investigate those of them corresponding to sets of permutations defining…
For every positive integer $n$ greater than $4$ there is a set of Latin squares of order $n$ such that every permutation of the numbers $1,\ldots,n$ appears exactly once as a row, a column, a reverse row or a reverse column of one of the…
A Latin square of order $n$ is an $n$ by $n$ grid filled using $n$ symbols so that each symbol appears exactly once in each row and column. A transversal in a Latin square is a collection of cells which share no symbol, row or column. The…
The independence number of a square matrix $A$, denoted by $\alpha(A)$, is the maximum order of its principal zero submatrices. Let $S_n^{+}$ be the set of $n\times n$ nonnegative symmetric matrices with zero trace. Denote by $J_n$ the…