Related papers: Sorting by pile shuffles on queue-like and stack-l…
Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…
The complexity and decidability of various decision problems involving the shuffle operation are studied. The following three problems are all shown to be $NP$-complete: given a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) $M$, and two words $u$…
Sorting algorithms have attracted a great deal of attention and study, as they have numerous applications to Mathematics, Computer Science and related fields. In this thesis, we first deal with the mathematical analysis of the Quicksort…
The literal and the initial literal shuffle have been introduced to model the behavior of two synchronized processes. However, it is not possible to describe the synchronization of multiple processes. Furthermore, both restricted forms of…
Recently, many results on the computational complexity of sorting algorithms were obtained using Kolmogorov complexity (the incompressibility method). Especially, the usually hard average-case analysis is ammenable to this method. Here we…
In card-based cryptography, a deck of physical cards is used to achieve secure computation. A shuffle, which randomly permutes a card-sequence along with some probability distribution, ensures the security of a card-based protocol. The…
This work studies rearrangement problems involving the sorting of robots or objects in stack-like containers, which can be accessed only from one side. Two scenarios are considered: one where every robot or object needs to reach a…
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 determine the maximal number of steps required to sort $n$ labeled points on a circle by adjacent swaps. Lower bounds for sorting by all swaps, not necessarily adjacent, are given as well.
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 investigate the $k$-cycle shuffle on repeated cards, namely on a deck consisting of $l$ identical copies of each of $m$ card types, with total size $n=ml$. We establish asymptotic results for the total variation mixing of this shuffle,…
We study the Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model for riffle shuffles and ask 'How many times must a deck of cards be shuffled for the deck to be in close to random order?'. In 1992, Bayer and Diaconis gave a solution which gives exact and…
The NP-hard maximum value preordering problem is both a joint relaxation and a hybrid of the clique partition problem (a clustering problem) and the partial ordering problem. Toward approximate solutions and lower bounds, we introduce a…
We prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…
We develop a combinatorial and order-theoretic framework for shuffles, understood as ordered concatenations of indexed families of sequences that induce total orders on the natural numbers. Motivated by the classical \v{S}arkovski\u{i}…
Pattern avoiding machines were recently introduced by Claesson, Ferrari and the current author to gain a better understanding of the classical $2$-stacksort problem. In this paper we generalize these devices by allowing permutations with…
In this paper we study random orderings of the integers with a certain invariance property. We describe all such orders in a simple way. We define and represent random shuffles of a countable set of labels and then give an interpretation of…
We investigate the mathematics behind unshuffles, a type of card shuffle closely related to classical perfect shuffles. To perform an unshuffle, deal all the cards alternately into two piles and then stack the one pile on top of the other.…