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    6 views3 pages

    EWD502

    Uploaded by

    Suprvreid

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 3
    pen suny tyre Ewvso2 - 0 On a gauntlet thrown by Devid Gril Freshly arrived from the U.S.A, --they still struggled with the time shift-- David Gries and his family paid us a visit a few weeks ago. It was not an occasion for “working together", yot some shoptelk wes unavoidable, end David confronted me with the protlem how to generate the n! permutations of the numbers © through n-1 such that the transition from one permutation te the next would ©. ly involve the swapping of two neighbours. He told me the problem becouse he hed found it 6 non-trivial task to present an olgarithm solving this protien in a convineing manner, He --good boy!-- respected ny desize not to be told how he had solved the difficulties of presenting his solution, and he granted me the opportunity to think about the problem myself. (He told me, thot the problem had been dealt with in the Algorithms Section Of the Comm.ACM, but at the level of Unintelligibility that i$ characteristic for that Section, ond we agreed wholehearted?y thet @ tradition of clearer Presentation of algorithms is most sorely nended.) Note. Those of my readers who would like to try to salve this problem therselves should stop reading here. (End of Note.) As the swapping of two neighbours changes the number of inversions --i.e. ‘the number of paire in the wrang orde: by 1, it ds suggested to try to cheracterizé each permutation by ite inversions, If we consider an arbitrary permutation of the numbers O through n=! , each permutation is uniquely characterized by the values inv(i) , with O4 and inv(j) = EwD5O2 = 2 The reason for this formula: i is its original position, inv(i) is the number of smaller elements to the right of it; we have to add to it the number of larger elements in front of the section with elements

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