Abstract
We study the problem of sorting N elements in the presence of persistent errors in comparisons: In this classical model, each comparison between two elements is wrong independently with some probability up to p, but repeating the same comparison gives always the same result. In this model, it is impossible to reliably compute a perfectly sorted permutation of the input elements. Rather, the quality of a sorting algorithm is often evaluated w.r.t. the maximum dislocation of the sequences it computes, namely, the maximum absolute difference between the position of an element in the returned sequence and the position of the same element in the perfectly sorted sequence. The best known algorithms for this problem have running time O(N2) and achieve, w.h.p., an optimal maximum dislocation of \(O(\log N)\) for constant error probability p. Note that no algorithm can achieve maximum dislocation \(o(\log N)\) w.h.p., regardless of its running time. In this work we present the first subquadratic time algorithm with optimal maximum dislocation. Our algorithm runs in \(\widetilde {O}(N^{3/2})\) time and it guarantees \(O(\log N)\) maximum dislocation with high probability for any p ≤ 1/16.
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Notes
The \(\widetilde {O}(f(n))\) notation is a shorthand for \(O(f(n) \log ^{c} f(n))\) for some positive constant c.
For the sake of simplicity, here and in the rest of the paper, we assume that |S| is a multiple of the block size.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Peter Widmayer for several inspiring discussions. We are also grateful to the anonymous referees for providing many useful suggestions that greatly improved the presentation and some of the proofs of this work. Research supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Project 200021_165524, Energy-Tunable Combinatorial Algorithms).
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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Special Issue on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (2018)
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Geissmann, B., Leucci, S., Liu, CH. et al. Optimal Dislocation with Persistent Errors in Subquadratic Time. Theory Comput Syst 64, 508–521 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-019-09957-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-019-09957-5