Related papers: Partial shuffles by lazy swaps

In this paper, we investigate the properties of a random walk on the alternating group $A_n$ generated by $3$-cycles of the form $(i,n-1,n)$ and $(i,n,n-1)$. We call this the transpose top-$2$ with random shuffle. We find the spectrum of…

A sorting network is a shortest path from $12\dots n$ to $n\dots 21$ in the Cayley graph of the symmetric group $\mathfrak S_n$ spanned by adjacent transpositions. The paper computes the edge local limit of the uniformly random sorting…

We consider the problem of determining the maximum number of moves required to sort a permutation of $[n]$ using cut-and-paste operations, in which a segment is cut out and then pasted into the remaining string, possibly reversed. We give…

The best known lower and upper bounds on the mixing time for the random-to-random insertions shuffle are $(1/2-o(1))n\log n$ and $(2+o(1))n\log n$. A long standing open problem is to prove that the mixing time exhibits a cutoff. In…

Let $\log^{2+\varepsilon} n \le d \le n/2$ for some fixed $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$, and let $M_n$ be an $n\times n$ random matrix with entries in ${0,1}$, where each row is independently and uniformly sampled from the set of all vectors in…

We continue the study of Adin, Alon and Roichman [arXiv:2502.14398, 2025] on the number of steps required to sort $n$ labelled points on a circle by transpositions. Imagine that the vertices of a cycle of length $n$ are labelled by the…

In the cyclic-to-random shuffle, we are given n cards arranged in a circle. At step k, we exchange the k'th card along the circle with a uniformly chosen random card. The problem of determining the mixing time of the cyclic-to-random…

We study the typical behavior of the least common multiple of the elements of a random subset $A\subset \{1,\dots, n\}$. For example we prove that $\text{lcm}\{a:\ a\in A\}=2^{n(1+o(1))}$ for almost all subsets $A\subset\{1,\dots,n\}$.

Let $M_n$ be the minimal position at generation $n$, of a real-valued branching random walk in the boundary case. As $n \to \infty$, $M_n- {3 \over 2} \log n$ is tight (see [1][9][2]). We establish here a law of iterated logarithm for the…

Consider a finite sequence of permutations of the elements 1,...,n, with the property that each element changes its position by at most 1 from any permutation to the next. We call such a sequence a tangle, and we define a move of element i…

We show that several versions of Floyd and Rivest's improved algorithm Select for finding the $k$th smallest of $n$ elements require at most $n+\min\{k,n-k\}+O(n^{1/2}\ln^{1/2}n)$ comparisons on average and with high probability. This…

We consider shifts $\Pi_{n,m}$ of a partially exchangeable random partition $\Pi_\infty$ of $\mathbb{N}$ obtained by restricting $\Pi_\infty$ to $\{n+1,n+2,\dots, n+m\}$ and then subtracting $n$ from each element to get a partition of…

In this paper, we present a detailed proof for the exhibition of a cutoff for the one-sided transposition (OST) shuffle on the generalized symmetric group $G_{m,n}$. Our work shows that based on techniques for $m \leq 2$ proven by…

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…

The Boolean lattice $2^{[n]}$ is the family of all subsets of $[n]=\{1,\dots,n\}$ ordered by inclusion, and a chain is a family of pairwise comparable elements of $2^{[n]}$. Let $s=2^{n}/\binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor}$, which is the average…

In this paper, we investigate the mixing time of the adjacent transposition shuffle for a deck of $N$ cards. We prove that around time $N^2\log N/(2\pi^2)$, the total variation distance to equilibrium of the deck distribution drops abruptly…

Let $\gamma(S_n)$ be the minimum number of proper subgroups $H_i$ of the symmetric group $S_n$ such that each element in $S_n$ lies in some conjugate of one of the $H_i.$ In this paper we conjecture that…

The mathematics of shuffling a deck of $2n$ cards with two "perfect shuffles" was brought into clarity by Diaconis, Graham and Kantor. Here we consider a generalisation of this problem, with a so-called "many handed dealer" shuffling $kn$…

We consider a random walk of $n$ steps starting at $x_0=0$ with a double exponential (Laplace) jump distribution. We compute exactly the distribution $p_{k,n}(\Delta)$ of the gap $d_{k,n}$ between the $k^{\rm th}$ and $(k+1)^{\rm th}$…

Let $\{G_n\}_1^{\infty}$ be a sequence of non-trivial finite groups. In this paper, we study the properties of a random walk on the complete monomial group $G_n\wr S_n$ generated by the elements of the form…