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  1. Home > Articles & Issues >
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  3. Fixed Point Homing S ...
Article

Fixed Point Homing Shuffles

Jonathan Parlett
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Submitted on
October 31, 2024
Accepted on
July 9, 2025
Published on
August 18, 2025
Last modified on
August 18, 2025
Special issue 27
vol. 27:1, Permutation Patterns 2024
Special issues
DOI
10.46298/dmtcs.14653
License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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677
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599
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Fixed Point Homing Shuffles

Jonathan Parlett
Abstract
We study a family of maps from $S_n \to S_n$ we call fixed point homing shuffles. These maps generalize a few known problems such as Conway's Topswops, and a card shuffling process studied by Gweneth McKinley. We show that the iterates of these homing shuffles always converge, and characterize the set $U_n$ of permutations that no homing shuffle sorts. We also study a homing shuffle that sorts anything not in $U_n$, and find how many iterations it takes to converge in the worst case. Updated formatting to fit with DMTCS requirements
Keywords
  • Combinatorics
Mathematics Subject Classification 2020
  • 05A05 - Permutations, words, matrices
  • 68P10 - Searching and sorting
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