Related papers: Permutations of counters on a table

Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…

Consider the following Maker-Breaker game. Fix a finite subset $S\subset\mathbb{N}$ of the naturals. The players Maker and Breaker take turns choosing previously unclaimed natural numbers. Maker wins by eventually building a homothetic copy…

Positional games are a well-studied class of combinatorial game. In their usual form, two players take turns to play moves in a set (`the board'), and certain subsets are designated as `winning': the first person to occupy such a set wins…

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…

Permutations are usually enumerated by size, but new results can be found by enumerating them by inversions instead, in which case one must restrict one's attention to indecomposable permutations. In the style of the seminal paper by Simion…

We consider the two-player game chomp on posets associated to numerical semigroups and show that the analysis of strategies for chomp is strongly related to classical properties of semigroups. We characterize, which player has a…

Sprout is a two-player pen and paper game which starts with $n$ vertices, and the players take turns to join two pre-existing dots by a subdivided edge while keeping the graph sub-cubic planar at all times. The first player not being able…

Toral introduced so-called cooperative Parrondo games, in which there are N players (3 or more) arranged in a circle. At each turn one player is randomly chosen to play. He plays either game A or game B. Game A results in a win or loss of…

An $n$-tournament $T$ with vertex set $V$ is simple if there is no subset $M$ of $V$ such that $2\leq \left \vert M\right \vert \leq n-1$ and for every $x\in V\setminus M$, either $M\rightarrow x$ or $x \rightarrow M$. The simplicity index…

We derive a recursive formula for the moments of the number of flips using a possibly biased coin to produce a prescribed finite binary string $S$ when $S$ is either a run of heads or a run of heads followed by a tails. Our recursive…

In sports competitions, teams can manipulate the result by, for instance, throwing games. We show that we can decide how to manipulate round robin and cup competitions, two of the most popular types of sporting competitions in polynomial…

When are all positions of a game numbers? We show that two properties are necessary and sufficient. These properties are consequences of that, in a number, it is not an advantage to be the first player. One of these properties implies the…

We find the winning strategy for a class of truncation games played on words. As a consequence of the present author's recent results on some of these games we obtain new formulas for Bernoulli numbers and polynomials of the second kind and…

A special sorting operation called Context Directed Swap, and denoted \textbf{cds}, performs certain types of block interchanges on permutations. When a permutation is sortable by \textbf{cds}, then \textbf{cds} sorts it using the fewest…

We prove the conjecture by M. Yip stating that counting genus one partitions by the number of their elements and parts yields, up to a shift of indices, the same array of numbers as counting genus one rooted hypermonopoles. Our proof…

Let m be a fixed positive integer. It is well-known that a permutation $\sigma$ may have one, many, or no mth roots. In this note we provide an explicit expression and a generating function for the number of mth roots of \sigma. Let p_m(n)…

In the top to random shuffle, the first a cards are removed from a deck of n cards 12 \cdots n and then inserted back into the deck. This action can be studied by treating the top to random shuffle as an element B_a, which we define…

In this paper we study the inverse of so-called unfair permutations, and explore various properties of them. Our investigation begins with comparing this class of permutations with uniformly random permutations, and showing that they behave…

Define $s (n) := n^{- 1} \sigma (n)$ ($\sigma (n):=\sum_{d|n}d )$ and $\omega(n)$ is the number of prime divisors of $n$. One of the properties of $s$ plays a central role: $s (p^a) > s (q^b)$ if $p < q$ are prime numbers, with no special…

Let $\{A_{i,n}\}$ be a triangular array of elements in a Banach algebra, whose norms do not grow too fast, and whose row averages converge to $A$. Let $\sigma \in S(n)$ be a permutation drawn uniformly at random. If the array only contains…