Hi Someone,

> You are right. In my previous posts I used the word "transposition"

I had this misunderstanding a few times (me making the fuss :-\ ) But I see
now that you say elementary transpositions.

> Ok. But a general transposition can still be composed of
> individual elementary ones and we can get the complicated
> factor by combining the simple factors, no?

Hm, that is a difficult question. In case of a group defined by generators and
relations, if you can solve the word problem, then you can decide if two
presentations of an element are identical. Note that a Hecke algebra is a
generalization of the symmetric group (algebra). If you take elementary
transpositions as generators, then things like length, parity etc _can_ be
defined (and that is possibly what you want for `sorting'). Eg using
q-symmetrizers
you get q-Grassmann alegbras etc...

> For the merge sort it may be less obvious. But we can get the
> correct number of elementary transpositions by incrementing the
> count not only by 1 but by a larger amount for each merge operation.

I had a similar problem determining the correct sign in the Murnaghan
Nakayama rule, and there a different representation of Young diagrams
makes the counting much faster. You keep track for general transpositions
how many elementary transpositions are needed to do them.

> If I did not misunderstand you these sorting algorithms
> are perfectly valid even for the generalized cases.

Yes, where `general' does mean symmetric group, and alike structures
such as Hecke algebras, ...

> Maybe you have a simple example ready to try?

I had somewhere experimental maple code, but I forgot/deleted it?
However, your approach seems to work well anyhow ...

Cheers
BF.

-- 
  quam cito dictur, tam facile non fit!
% Dr habil Bertfried Fauser
% contact |->    URL : http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~fauserb/
%              Phone :  +44 7508593565

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"FriCAS - computer algebra system" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en.

Reply via email to