2008/12/20 by Masud Hasan, Hasan, Masud, Atif Rahman +7
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Algorithms and Data Compression #Chromosomal and Genetic Variations #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Genome Rearrangement Algorithms #Other Computer Science (cs.OH) #cs.DS #cs.OH
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0812.3933
10 pages, 3 figures
openalex publication_date 2008/12/20 · arxiv created 2009/05/04 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper we study several variations of the pancake flipping problem, which is also well known as the problem of sorting by prefix reversals. We consider the variations in the sorting process by adding with prefix reversals other similar operations such as prefix transpositions and prefix transreversals. These type of sorting problems have applications in interconnection networks and computational biology. We first study the problem of sorting unsigned permutations by prefix reversals and prefix transpositions and present a 3-approximation algorithm for this problem. Then we give a 2-approximation algorithm for sorting by prefix reversals and prefix transreversals. We also provide a 3-approximation algorithm for sorting by prefix reversals and prefix transpositions where the operations are always applied at the unsorted suffix of the permutation. We further analyze the problem in more practical way and show quantitatively how approximation ratios of our algorithms improve with the increase of number of prefix reversals applied by optimal algorithms. Finally, we present experimental results to support our analysis.