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doi:10.1016/S0020-0190(96)00155-X 
Copyright © 1996 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
Sorting permutations by block-interchanges
David A. Christie
, 1
Received 8 November 1995;
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Abstract
Various global rearrangements of permutations, such as reversals and transpositions have recently become of interest because of their applications in genome analysis. The study of such rearrangements leads to computational problems that are of interest in their own right. In this paper we introduce an operation, called block-interchange, in which two substrings, or blocks, swap positions in the permutation. We demonstrate a polynomial-time algorithm for calculating the block-interchange distance of a permutation (i.e. the minimum number of block-interchanges required to transform the permutation to the identity). We also determine the block-interchange diameter of the symmetric group.
Author Keywords: Algorithms; Combinatorial problems; Sorting; String comparison; Permutations
