Related papers: Berge Sorting
The Plurality problem - introduced by Aigner \cite{A2004} - has many variants. In this article we deal with the following version: suppose we are given $n$ balls, each of them colored by one of three colors. A \textit{plurality ball} is one…
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…
Black strings, one class of higher dimensional analogues of black holes, were shown to be unstable to long wavelength perturbations by Gregory and Laflamme in 1992, via a linear analysis. We revisit the problem through numerical solution of…
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 work, we study the generalized sorting problem, where we are given a set of $n$ elements to be sorted, but only a subset of all possible pairwise element comparisons is allowed. We look at the problem from the perspective of the…
Let $k,p,q$ be three positive integers. A graph $G$ with order $n$ is said to be $k$-placeable if there are $k$ edge disjoint copies of $G$ in the complete graph on $n$ vertices. A $(p,\,q)$-graph is a graph of order $p$ with $q$ edges.…
We consider a logical puzzle which we call double pouring problem, which was original defined for $k=3$ vessels. We generalize this definition to $k \ge 2 $ as follows. Each of the $k$ vessels contains an integer amount of water, called its…
Given a set of alternatives to be ranked, and some pairwise comparison data, ranking is a least squares computation on a graph. The vertices are the alternatives, and the edge values comprise the comparison data. The basic idea is very…
The Graceful Tree Conjecture of Rosa from 1967 asserts that the vertices of each tree T of order n can be injectively labelled by using the numbers {1,2,...,n} in such a way that the absolute differences induced on the edges are pairwise…
In the first place, a novel, yet straightforward in-place integer value-sorting algorithm is presented. It sorts in linear time using constant amount of additional memory for storing counters and indices beside the input array. The…
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 online sorting problem, a sequence of $n$ numbers in $[0, 1]$ (including $\{0,1\}$) have to be inserted in an array of size $m \ge n$ so as to minimize the sum of absolute differences between pairs of numbers occupying consecutive…
The sorting operation is one of the most commonly used building blocks in computer programming. In machine learning, it is often used for robust statistics. However, seen as a function, it is piecewise linear and as a result includes many…
Given a permutation pi, the application of prefix reversal f^(i) to pi reverses the order of the first i elements of pi. The problem of Sorting By Prefix Reversals (also known as pancake flipping), made famous by Gates and Papadimitriou…
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 propose a new kind of sliding-block puzzle, called Gourds, where the objective is to rearrange 1 x 2 pieces on a hexagonal grid board of 2n + 1 cells with n pieces, using sliding, turning and pivoting moves. This puzzle has a single…
Given a set S of integers whose sum is zero, consider the problem of finding a permutation of these integers such that: (i) all prefix sums of the ordering are nonnegative, and (ii) the maximum value of a prefix sum is minimized. Kellerer…
Let $n$ and $\ell$ be positive integers. Recent papers by Kreher, Stinson and Veitch have explored variants of the problem of ordering the points in a triple system (such as a Steiner triple system, directed triple system or Mendelsohn…
We study the following Steinberg-type problem on circular coloring: for an odd integer $k\ge 3$, what is the smallest number $f(k)$ such that every planar graph of girth $k$ without cycles of length from $k+1$ to $f(k)$ admits a…
A sorting network is a shortest path from 12..n to n..21 in the Cayley graph of the symmetric group S(n) generated by nearest-neighbor swaps. A pattern is a sequence of swaps that forms an initial segment of some sorting network. We prove…