Related papers: A new lower bound for deterministic pop-stack-sort…
Pop-Stack Sorting is an algorithm that takes a permutation as an input and sorts its elements. It consists of several steps. At one step, the algorithm reads the permutation it has to process from left to right and reverses each of its…
We use stack words to find a new, simple proof for the best known upper bound for the number of 3-stack sortable permutations of a given length. This is the first time that stack words are used to obtain such a result.
Pop-stacks are variants of stacks that were introduced by Avis and Newborn in 1981. Coincidentally, a 1982 result of Unger implies that every permutation of length n can be sorted by n-1 passes through a deterministic pop-stack. We give a…
A fork stack is a generalised stack which allows pushes and pops of several items at a time. We consider the problem of determining which input streams can be sorted using a single forkstack, or dually, which permutations of a fixed input…
We introduce a new sorting device for permutations which makes use of a pop stack augmented with a bypass operation. This results in a sorting machine, which is more powerful than the usual Popstacksort algorithm and seems to have never…
Flip-sort is a natural sorting procedure which raises fascinating combinatorial questions. It finds its roots in the seminal work of Knuth on stack-based sorting algorithms and leads to many links with permutation patterns. We present…
We consider the set of permutations that are sorted after two passes through a pop stack. We characterize these permutations in terms of forbidden patterns (classical and barred) and enumerate them according to the ascent statistic. Then we…
We use a method for determining the number of preimages of any permutation under the stack-sorting map in order to obtain recursive upper bounds for the numbers $W_t(n)$ and $W_t(n,k)$ of $t$-stack sortable permutations of length $n$ and…
We consider sorting procedures for permutations making use of pop stacks with a bypass operation, and explore the combinatorial properties of the associated algorithms.
We consider permutations sortable by $k$ passes through a deterministic pop stack. We show that for any $k\in\mathbb N$ the set is characterised by finitely many patterns, answering a question of Claesson and Gu{\dh}mundsson. Our…
We prove a "decomposition lemma" that allows us to count preimages of certain sets of permutations under West's stack-sorting map $s$. As a first application, we give a new proof of Zeilberger's formula for the number of 2-stack-sortable…
We introduce an algorithm to determine when a sorting operation, such as stack-sort or bubble-sort, outputs a given pattern. The algorithm provides a new proof of the description of West-2-stack-sortable permutations, that is permutations…
We introduce a sorting machine consisting of $k+1$ stacks in series: the first $k$ stacks can only contain elements in decreasing order from top to bottom, while the last one has the opposite restriction. This device generalizes \cite{SM},…
We characterise and enumerate permutations that are sortable by n-4 passes through a stack. We conjecture the number of permutations sortable by n-5 passes, and also the form of a formula for the general case n-k, which involves a…
Permutations in the image of the pop-stack operator are said to be pop-stacked. We give a polynomial-time algorithm to count pop-stacked permutations up to a fixed length and we use it to compute the first 1000 terms of the corresponding…
We prove a lower and an upper bound on the number of block moves necessary to sort a permutation. We put our results in contrast with existing results on sorting by block transpositions, and raise some open questions.
We study sorting machines consisting of a stack and a pop stack in series, with or without a queue between them. While there are, a priori, four such machines, only two are essentially different: a pop stack followed directly by a stack,…
We consider a stack sorting algorithm where only the appropriate output values are popped from the stack and then any remaining entries in the stack are run through the stack in reverse order. We identify the basis for the $2$-reverse pass…
In an exercise in the first volume of his famous series of books, Knuth considered sorting permutations by passing them through a stack. Many variations of this exercise have since been considered, including allowing multiple passes through…
There is a growing body of work on sorting and selection in models other than the unit-cost comparison model. This work is the first treatment of a natural stochastic variant of the problem where the cost of comparing two elements is a…