Related papers: Short Proofs for Cut-and-Paste Sorting of Permutat…
We prove that deciding whether a given input word contains as subsequence every possible permutation of integers $\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ is coNP-complete. The coNP-completeness holds even when given the guarantee that the input word contains as…
Pancake flipping, a famous open problem in computer science, can be formalised as the problem of sorting a permutation of positive integers using as few prefix reversals as possible. In that context, a prefix reversal of length k reverses…
Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…
Permutation patterns and pattern avoidance have been intensively studied in combinatorics and computer science, going back at least to the seminal work of Knuth on stack-sorting (1968). Perhaps the most natural algorithmic question in this…
Recall that a Stirling permutation is a permutation on the multiset $\{1,1,2,2,\ldots,n,n\}$ such that any numbers appearing between repeated values of $i$ must be greater than $i$. We call a Stirling permutation ``flattened'' if the…
The problem of genealogy of permutations has been solved partially by Stefan (odd order) and Acosta-Hum\'anez \& Bernhardt (power of two). It is well known that Sharkovskii's theorem shows the relationship between the cardinal of the set of…
What is the smallest number of random transpositions (meaning that we swap given pairs of elements with given probabilities) that we can make on an $n$-point set to ensure that each element is uniformly distributed -- in the sense that the…
A superpermutation is a sequence that contains every permutation of $n$ distinct symbols as a contiguous substring. For instance, a valid example for three symbols is a sequence that contains all six permutations. This paper introduces a…
An infinite permutation is a linear ordering of the set of non-negative integers. Generally, the properties of infinite permutations analogous to those of infinite words show some resemblances and some differences between permutations and…
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 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…
The problem of determining which permutations can be sorted using certain switchyard networks dates back to Knuth in 1968. In this work, we are interested in permutations which are sortable on a double-ended queue (called a deque), or on…
An oracle chooses a function $f$ from the set of $n$ bits strings to itself, which is either a randomly chosen permutation or a randomly chosen function. When queried by an $n$-bit string $w$, the oracle computes $f(w)$, truncates the $m$…
We study preimages of permutations under the bubblesort operator $\mathbf{B}$. We achieve a description of these preimages much more complete than what is known for the more complicated sorting operators $\mathbf{S}$ (stacksort) and…
Let M(n, d) be the maximum size of a permutation array on n symbols with pairwise Hamming distance at least d. We use various combinatorial, algebraic, and computational methods to improve lower bounds for M(n, d). We compute the Hamming…
Given a real number beta>1, a permutation pi of length n is realized by the beta-shift if there is some x in [0,1] such that the relative order of the sequence x,f(x),...,f^{n-1}(x), where f(x) is the factional part of beta*x, is the same…
Let $m, n$ be positive integers such that $m>1$ divides $n$. In this paper, we introduce a special class of piecewise-affine permutations of the finite set $[1, n]:=\{1, \ldots, n\}$ with the property that the reduction $\pmod m$ of $m$…
In this article, we study the problem of finding the longest common separable pattern between several permutations. We give a polynomial-time algorithm when the number of input permutations is fixed and show that the problem is NP-hard for…
The problem of storing permutations in a distributed manner arises in several common scenarios, such as efficient updates of a large, encrypted, or compressed data set. This problem may be addressed in either a combinatorial or a coding…
Numerical evidence suggests that certain permutation patterns of length k are easier to avoid than any other patterns of that same length. We prove that these patterns are avoided by no more than (2.25k^2)^n permutations of length n. In…