A new universal cycle for permutations (Q1696522)

In this nice note, the author presents a simple 4-case shift rule on the set of permutations \(\Pi(n)\) of \(\{1,\ldots,n\}\) that is then proved to iteratively produce each of these \(n!\) permutations in cyclical order. The author then considers the sequence \(U\) obtained by successively choosing the first symbol of each of these permutations, starting with the permutation \(12\cdots n\). Using shorthand notation \(a_1a_2\cdots a_{n-1}\) to represent permutations \(a_1a_2\cdots a_n\in \Pi(n)\), it is possible to express each of the permutations in \(\Pi(n)\) as \(n!\) consecutive subsequences of length \(n-1\) of some cyclic sequence of \(n!\) symbols from \(\{1,2,\ldots,n\}\). The author introduce relaxed shorthand notation which cleverly generalises shorthand notation for permutations, and proves that the consecutive subsequences of length \(n\) in the sequence \(U\), taken cyclicly, uniquely represents each of the permutations in \(\Pi(n)\) via this relaxed shorthand notation. An efficient algorithm to generate \(U\) is also given, along with C code to implement this algorithm.