Abstract
The Sorting by Strip Moves problem, SBSM, was introduced in [6] as a variant of the well-known Sorting by Transpositions problem. A restriction called Block Sorting was shown in [2] to be NP-hard. In this article, we improve upon the ideas used in [6] to obtain a combinatorial characterization of the optimal solutions of SBSM. Using this, we show that a strip move which results in a permutation of two or three fewer strips or which exchanges a pair of adjacent strips to merge them into a single strip necessarily reduces the strip move distance. We also establish that the strip move diameter for permutations of size n is n–1. Further, we exhibit an optimum-preserving equivalence between SBSM and the Common Substring Removals problem (CSR) – a natural combinatorial puzzle. As a consequence, we show that sorting a permutation via strip moves is as hard (or as easy) as sorting its inverse.
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Mahajan, M., Rama, R., Vijayakumar, S. (2004). Towards Constructing Optimal Strip Move Sequences. In: Chwa, KY., Munro, J.I.J. (eds) Computing and Combinatorics. COCOON 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3106. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27798-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-27798-9_6
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