Related papers: Berge Sorting
Inspired by a common technique for shuffling a deck of cards on a table without riffling, we formalize the pile shuffle and investigate its capabilities as a sorting device. Our study is novel in that we consider pile shuffle in three…
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…
Consider a randomly shuffled deck of $2n$ cards with $n$ red cards and $n$ black cards. We study the average number of moves it takes to go from a randomly shuffled deck to a deck that alternates in color by performing the following move:…
In the 1960s, Erd\H{o}s and Gallai conjectured that the edge set of every graph on n vertices can be partitioned into O(n) cycles and edges. They observed that one can easily get an O(n log n) upper bound by repeatedly removing the edges of…
The square peg problem asks whether every continuous curve in the plane that starts and ends at the same point without self-intersecting contains four distinct corners of some square. Toeplitz conjectured in 1911 that this is indeed the…
For each positive integer $n$, we denote by $\omega^*(n)$ the number of shifted-prime divisors $p-1$ of $n$, i.e., \[\omega^*(n):=\sum_{p-1\mid n}1.\] First introduced by Prachar in 1955, this function has interesting applications in…
In this paper, we study the alternating direction method for finding the Dantzig selectors, which are first introduced in [8]. In particular, at each iteration we apply the nonmonotone gradient method proposed in [17] to approximately solve…
Suppose we place checkers in the lower left corner of a Go board and wish to move them to the upper right corner in as few moves as possible, where the pieces move as in the game of Chinese checkers. Auslander, Benjamin, and Wilkerson in…
Motivation coming from the study of affine Weyl groups, a structure of ranked poset is defined on the set of circular permutations in $S_n$ (that is, $n$-cycles). It is isomorphic to the poset of so-called admitted vectors, and to an…
A permutation $\pi$ over alphabet $\Sigma = {1,2,3,\ldots,n}$, is a sequence where every element $x$ in $\Sigma$ occurs exactly once. $S_n$ is the symmetric group consisting of all permutations of length $n$ defined over $\Sigma$. $I_n$ =…
We study the connections between sorting and the binary search tree (BST) model, with an aim towards showing that the fields are connected more deeply than is currently appreciated. While any BST can be used to sort by inserting the keys…
This paper continues the analysis of the pattern-avoiding sorting machines recently introduced by Cerbai, Claesson and Ferrari [CCF]. These devices consist of two stacks, through which a permutation is passed in order to sort it, where the…
Kr\'al' and Sgall (2005) introduced a refinement of list colouring where every colour list must be subset to one predetermined palette of colours. We call this $(k,\ell)$-choosability when the palette is of size at most $\ell$ and the lists…
Fredman proposed in 1976 the following algorithmic problem: Given are a ground set $X$, some partial order $P$ over $X$, and some comparison oracle $O_L$ that specifies a linear order $L$ over $X$ that extends $P$. A query to $O_L$ has as…
The order $O_n(\sigma)$ of a permutation $\sigma$ of $n$ objects is the smallest integer $k \geq 1$ such that the $k$-th iterate of $\sigma$ gives the identity. A remarkable result about the order of a uniformly chosen permutation is due to…
Consider a string of $n$ positions, i.e. a discrete string of length $n$. Units of length $k$ are placed at random on this string in such a way that they do not overlap, and as often as possible, i.e. until all spacings between neighboring…
We consider the problem of sorting $n$ items, given the outcomes of $m$ pre-existing comparisons. We present a simple and natural deterministic algorithm that runs in $O(m + \log T)$ time and does $O(\log T)$ comparisons, where $T$ is the…
It is a long-standing open question to determine the minimum number of comparisons $S(n)$ that suffice to sort an array of $n$ elements. Indeed, before this work $S(n)$ has been known only for $n\leq 22$ with the exception for $n=16$, $17$,…
Sorting extremely large datasets is a frequently occuring task in practice. These datasets are usually much larger than the computer's main memory; thus external memory sorting algorithms, first introduced by Aggarwal and Vitter (1988), are…