Concerning the bookshelf problem
History and Overview
2014-12-25 v1
Abstract
We discuss the following folklore problem. On a bookshelf, there are tomes of the Encyclopedia in random order. Each hour, a librarian takes a tome which stands not on its place, and puts it in its place. Show that the process will stop. A natural additional question is how many moves are required for the process to stop. We show that the process can last moves, and that it will stop anyway in less than moves.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1412.7749,
title = {Concerning the bookshelf problem},
author = {Lev Radzivilovsky and Grigori Yurgin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.7749},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
3 pages in Russian