Related papers: Perfect shuffling with fewer lazy transpositions
The nature of the alignment with gaps corresponding to a longest common subsequence (LCS) of two independent iid random sequences drawn from a finite alphabet is investigated. It is shown that such an optimal alignment typically matches…
An $(n,k)$ sequence covering array is a set of permutations of $[n]$ such that each sequence of $k$ distinct elements of $[n]$ is a subsequence of at least one of the permutations. An $(n,k)$ sequence covering array is perfect if there is a…
We consider uniform random permutations of length $n$ conditioned to have no cycle longer than $n^\beta$ with $0<\beta<1$, in the limit of large $n$. Since in unconstrained uniform random permutations most of the indices are in cycles of…
In this paper, we study the biased random transposition shuffle, a natural generalization of the classical random transposition shuffle studied by Diaconis and Shahshahani. We diagonalize the transition matrix of the shuffle and use these…
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…
We consider the probability $p(S_n)$ that a pair of random permutations generates either the alternating group $A_n$ or the symmetric group $S_n$. Dixon (1969) proved that $p(S_n)$ approaches $1$ as $n\to\infty$ and conjectured that…
Perfect sorting by reversals, a problem originating in computational genomics, is the process of sorting a signed permutation to either the identity or to the reversed identity permutation, by a sequence of reversals that do not break any…
We consider the distribution of the length of the longest subsequence avoiding a given pattern in a random permutation of length n. The well-studied case of a longest increasing subsequence corresponds to avoiding the pattern 21. We show…
The convolution between a text string $S$ of length $N$ and a pattern string $P$ of length $m$ can be computed in $O(N \log m)$ time by FFT. It is known that various types of approximate string matching problems are reducible to…
The fundamental question considered in algorithms on strings is that of indexing, that is, preprocessing a given string for specific queries. By now we have a number of efficient solutions for this problem when the queries ask for an exact…
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…
Two permutations are similar if they have the same length and the same relative order. A collection of $r\ge2$ disjoint, similar subsequences of a permutation $\pi$ form $r$-twins in $\pi$. We study the longest guaranteed length of…
An infinite permutation is a linear ordering of the set of natural numbers. An infinite permutation can be defined by a sequence of real numbers where only the order of elements is taken into account. In the paper we investigate a new class…
It is known that the number of permutations in the symmetric group $S_{2n}$ with cycles of odd lengths only is equal to the number of permutations with cycles of even lengths only. We prove a refinement of this equality, involving descent…
A Poisson Binomial distribution over $n$ variables is the distribution of the sum of $n$ independent Bernoullis. We provide a sample near-optimal algorithm for testing whether a distribution $P$ supported on $\{0,...,n\}$ to which we have…
Let $A(p,n,k)$ be the number of $p$-tuples of commuting permutations of $n$ elements whose permutation action results in exactly $k$ orbits or connected components. We formulate the conjecture that, for every fixed $p$ and $n$, the…
Given a sequence $s=(s_1,s_2,\ldots)$ of positive integers, the inversion sequences with respect to $s$, or $s$-inversion sequences, were introduced by Savage and Schuster in their study of lecture hall polytopes. A sequence…
A superpermutation is a sequence that contains every permutation of $n$ distinct symbols as a contiguous substring. For instance, a valid example for three symbols is a sequence that contains all six permutations. This paper introduces a…
We compute the expected number of commutations appearing in a reduced word for the longest element in the symmetric group. The asymptotic behavior of this value is analyzed and shown to approach the length of the permutation, meaning that…
We study sorting of permutations by random swaps if each comparison gives the wrong result with some fixed probability $p<1/2$. We use this process as prototype for the behaviour of randomized, comparison-based optimization heuristics in…