Related papers: The identity is the most likely exchange shuffle f…
It is shown that the maximum number of patterns that can occur in a permutation of length $n$ is asymptotically $2^n$. This significantly improves a previous result of Coleman.
In this note, we explicitly compute the probability that a given cell in a random standard Young tableau of the shifted staircase shape $(2n-1, 2n-3, \ldots, 3,1)$ contains the maximal label. We also show that the asymptotic distribution of…
We consider the following card guessing game with no feedback. An ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards. One after…
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…
Consider a well-shuffled deck of cards of $n$ different types where each type occurs $m$ times. In a complete feedback game, a player is asked to guess the top card from the deck. After each guess, the top card is revealed to the player and…
A conjecture by R. Stanley on a class of alternating permutations, which is proved by R. Chapman and L. Williams states that alternating permutations with the maximal number of fixed points is equidistributed with derangements. We extend…
This work explains how to utilize earlier results by P. Diaconis, K. Houston-Edwards and the second author to estimate probabilities related to the 4-player gambler ruin problem. For instance, we show that the probability that a very…
The multiplication game is a two-person game in which each player chooses a positive integer without knowledge of the other player's number. The two numbers are then multiplied together and the first digit of the product determines the…
Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…
A random 2-cell embedding of a given graph $G$ is obtained by choosing a random local rotation around every vertex. We analyze the expected number of faces of such an embedding, which is equivalent to studying its average genus. In 1991,…
How can we generate a permutation of the numbers $1$ through $n$ so that it is hard to guess the next element given the history so far? The twist is that the generator of the permutation (the ``Dealer") has limited memory, while the…
We introduce a statistic $\pmaj$ on partitions of $[n]=\{1,2,..., n\}$, and show that it is equidistributed with the number of 2-crossings over partitions of $[n]$ with given sets of minimal block elements and maximal block elements. This…
We initiate the study of sorting permutations using prefix block-interchanges, which exchange any prefix of a permutation with another non-intersecting interval. The goal is to transform a given permutation into the identity permutation…
Counting permutations of $[n]$ by the number of records, i.e. left-to-right maxima, is a classic problem in combinatorial enumeration. In the first volume of ``The Art of Computer Programming", Donald Knuth demonstrated its relevance for…
We consider a random walk on the hyperoctahedral group $B_n$ generated by the signed permutations of the forms $(i,n)$ and $(-i,n)$ for $1\leq i\leq n$. We call this the flip-transpose top with random shuffle on $B_n$. We find the spectrum…
The random transposition shuffle on repeated cards induces a Markov chain on the quotient space of arrangements with multiplicities, and is equivalent to the many-urn mean-field Bernoulli-Laplace model introduced by Scarabotti. Writing…
In this paper, we bound the number of edges of a maximal permutation graph with n vertices. We propose a new method to compute the lower bound by splitting the set of labellings of the edges into six parts, considering one separate problem…
A generalized `$15$ puzzle' consists of an $n \times n$ numbered grid, with one missing number. A move in the game switches the position of the empty square with the position of one of its neighbors. We solve Diaconis' `15 puzzle problem'…
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…
We study sorting by queues that can rearrange their content by applying permutations from a predefined set. These new sorting devices are called shuffle queues and we investigate those of them corresponding to sets of permutations defining…