Partial Shuffles by Lazy Swaps

DOI10.1137/22M1530677MaRDI QIDQ6069432zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Barnabás Janzer, J. Robert Johnson, Imre Leader

Publication date 14 November 2023

Published in SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13286

zbMATH Keywords

random permutationshufflingtransposition

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Permutations, words, matrices (05A05) Extremal combinatorics (05D99) Combinatorial probability (60C05)

Abstract: 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 probability that $i$ is mapped to $j$ is $1/n$ for all $i$ and $j$? And what if we insist that each pair is uniformly distributed? In this paper we show that the minimum for the first problem is about $frac12nlo{g}_{2}n$, with this being exact when $n$ is a power of $2$. For the second problem, we show that, rather surprisingly, the answer is not quadratic: $O(nlo{g}^{2}n)$ random transpositions suffice. We also show that if we ask only that the pair $1,2$ is uniformly distributed then the answer is $2n-3$. This proves a conjecture of Groenland, Johnston, Radcliffe and Scott.

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Cites work

• A Cure for the Telephone Disease
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3652373 (Why is no real title available?)
• Perfect shuffling by lazy swaps
• Random permutations using switching networks

Cited in

(3)

• Mixability of finite groups
• Short reachability networks
• Greedy gossiping

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