Pattern avoidance in forests of binary shrubs

We investigate pattern avoidance in permutations satisfying some additional restrictions. These are naturally considered in terms of avoiding patterns in linear extensions of certain forest-like partially ordered sets, which we call binary shrub forests. In this context, we enumerate forests avoiding patterns of length three. In four of the five non-equivalent cases, we present explicit enumerations by exhibiting bijections with certain lattice paths bounded above by the line y = lx, for some l in Q+, one of these being the celebrated Duchon’s club paths with l = 2/3. In the remaining case, we use the machinery of analytic combinatorics to determine the minimal polynomial of its generating function, and deduce its growth rate

On Buffon Machines and Numbers

The well-know needle experiment of Buffon can be regarded as an analog (i.e., continuous) device that stochastically "computes" the number 2/pi ~ 0.63661, which is the experiment's probability of success. Generalizing the experiment and simplifying the computational framework, we consider probability distributions, which can be produced perfectly, from a discrete source of unbiased coin flips. We describe and analyse a few simple Buffon machines that generate geometric, Poisson, and logarithmic-series distributions. We provide human-accessible Buffon machines, which require a dozen coin flips or less, on average, and produce experiments whose probabilities of success are expressible in terms of numbers such as, exp(-1), log 2, sqrt(3), cos(1/4), aeta(5). Generally, we develop a collection of constructions based on simple probabilistic mechanisms that enable one to design Buffon experiments involving compositions of exponentials and logarithms, polylogarithms, direct and inverse trigonometric functions, algebraic and hypergeometric functions, as well as functions defined by integrals, such as the Gaussian error function.Comment: Largely revised version with references and figures added. 12 pages. In ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA'2011

Generating all permutations by context-free grammars in Chomsky normal form

Let Ln be the finite language of all n! strings that are permutations of n different symbols (n1). We consider context-free grammars Gn in Chomsky normal form that generate Ln. In particular we study a few families {Gn}n1, satisfying L(Gn)=Ln for n1, with respect to their descriptional complexity, i.e. we determine the number of nonterminal symbols and the number of production rules of Gn as functions of n

Pattern Avoidance in Task-Precedence Posets

We have extended classical pattern avoidance to a new structure: multiple task-precedence posets whose Hasse diagrams have three levels, which we will call diamonds. The vertices of each diamond are assigned labels which are compatible with the poset. A corresponding permutation is formed by reading these labels by increasing levels, and then from left to right. We used Sage to form enumerative conjectures for the associated permutations avoiding collections of patterns of length three, which we then proved. We have discovered a bijection between diamonds avoiding 132 and certain generalized Dyck paths. We have also found the generating function for descents, and therefore the number of avoiders, in these permutations for the majority of collections of patterns of length three. An interesting application of this work (and the motivating example) can be found when task-precedence posets represent warehouse package fulfillment by robots, in which case avoidance of both 231 and 321 ensures we never stack two heavier packages on top of a lighter package.Comment: 17 page