Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Sorting By Block Moves, Jici Huang

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The research in this thesis is focused on the problem of Block Sorting, which has applications in Computational Biology and in Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A block in a permutation is a maximal sequence of consecutive elements that are also consecutive in the identity permutation. BLOCK SORTING is the process of transforming an arbitrary permutation to the identity permutation through a sequence of block moves. Given an arbitrary permutation π and an integer m, the Block Sorting Problem, or the problem of deciding whether the transformation can be accomplished in at most m block moves has been shown to be …