English

Concerning the bookshelf problem

History and Overview 2014-12-25 v1

Abstract

We discuss the following folklore problem. On a bookshelf, there are NN 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 2N112^{N-1}-1 moves, and that it will stop anyway in less than 2N2^N 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

R2 v1 2026-06-22T07:43:31.476Z