Related papers: Second Best, Third Worst, Fourth in Line

We propose a new class of models for random permutations, which we call log-linear models, by the analogy with log-linear models used in the analysis of contingency tables. As a special case, we study the family of all Luce-decomposable…

We study the space requirements of a sorting algorithm where only items that at the end will be adjacent are kept together. This is equivalent to the following combinatorial problem: Consider a string of fixed length n that starts as a…

In this note we put forward a conjecture on the average optimal length for bipartite matching with a finite number of elements where the different lengths are independent one from the others and have an exponential distribution.

We study the asymptotic behavior of the long cycles of a random permutation of $n$ objects with respect to multiplicative measures with polynomial growing cycle weights. We show that the longest cycle and the length differences between the…

We consider a random $N$-step polymer under the influence of an attractive interaction with the origin and derive a limit law -- after suitable shifting and norming -- for the length of the longest excursion towards the Gumbel distribution.…

We develop nonlinear renewal theorems for a perturbed random walk without assuming stochastic boundedness of centered perturbation terms. A second order expansion of the expected stopping time is obtained via the uniform integrability of…

Recent advances in natural language processing highlight two key factors for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs): (i) allocating more test-time compute tends to help on harder problems but often introduces redundancy in the…

We prove that most permutations of degree $n$ have some power which is a cycle of prime length approximately $\log n$. Explicitly, we show that for $n$ sufficiently large, the proportion of such elements is at least $1-5/\log\log n$ with…

Consider n unit intervals, say [1,2], [3,4], ..., [2n-1,2n]. Identify their endpoints in pairs at random, with all (2n-1)!! = (2n-1) (2n-3) ... 3 1 pairings being equally likely. The result is a collection of cycles of various lengths, and…

This note examines a problem in enumerative and asymptotic combinatorics involving the classical structure of integer compositions. What is sought is an analysis on average and in distribution of the length of the longest run of consecutive…

Iteration of the modular l-th power function f(x) = x^l (mod n) provides a common pseudorandom number generator (known as the Blum-Blum-Shub generator when l=2). The period of this pseudorandom number generator is closely related to…

We present an algorithm that computes a shortest non-contractible and a shortest non-separating cycle on an orientable combinatorial surface of bounded genus in O(n \log n) time, where n denotes the complexity of the surface. This solves a…

The distance profiles of linear block codes can be employed to design variational coding scheme for encoding message with variational length and getting lower decoding error probability by large minimum Hamming distance. %, e.g. the design…

In nonadaptive group testing, the main research objective is to design an efficient algorithm to identify a set of up to $t$ positive elements among $n$ samples with as few tests as possible. Disjunct matrices and separable matrices are two…

Consider a critical random multigraph $\mathcal{G}_n$ with $n$ vertices constructed by the configuration model such that its vertex degrees are independent random variables with the same distribution $\nu$ (criticality means that the second…

We study a system, called NEL, which is the mixed commutative/non-commutative linear logic BV augmented with linear logic's exponentials. Equivalently, NEL is MELL augmented with the non-commutative self-dual connective seq. In this paper,…

We introduce the notion of the stopping redundancy hierarchy of a linear block code as a measure of the trade-off between performance and complexity of iterative decoding for the binary erasure channel. We derive lower and upper bounds for…

We investigate the order of the $r$-th, $1\le r < +\infty$, central moment of the length of the longest common subsequence of two independent random words of size $n$ whose letters are identically distributed and independently drawn from a…

We consider the periods of the linear congruential and the power generators modulo $n$ and, for fixed choices of initial parameters, give lower bounds that hold for ``most'' $n$ when $n$ ranges over three different sets: the set of primes,…

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…