Generalized permutation patterns -- a short survey

Abstract

An occurrence of a classical pattern p in a permutation \pi is a subsequence of \pi whose letters are in the same relative order (of size) as those in p. In an occurrence of a generalized pattern, some letters of that subsequence may be required to be adjacent in the permutation. Subsets of permutations characterized by the avoidance--or the prescribed number of occurrences--of generalized patterns exhibit connections to an enormous variety of other combinatorial structures, some of them apparently deep. We give a short overview of the state of the art for generalized patterns.Comment: 11 pages. Added a section on asymptotics (Section 8), added more examples of barred patterns equal to generalized patterns (Section 7) and made a few other minor additions. To appear in ``Permutation Patterns, St Andrews 2007'', S.A. Linton, N. Ruskuc, V. Vatter (eds.), LMS Lecture Note Series, Cambridge University Pres