English

How many pop-stacks does it take to sort a permutation?

Combinatorics 2020-12-11 v1

Abstract

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 new proof of this result inspired by Knuth's zero-one principle.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.05275,
  title  = {How many pop-stacks does it take to sort a permutation?},
  author = {Michael Albert and Vincent Vatter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.05275},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:51:17.960Z