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Transposition is Nearly Optimal for IID List Update

Algorithms & optimization · posed by Ronald Rivest (transposition heuristic), 1976 · solved

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Statement

In the list update problem, is the simple transposition rule optimal under IID requests? The question traces to Rivest's 1976 study of self-organizing lists. The paper proves transposition is within a small constant factor of the optimal online algorithm under any IID distribution.

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No person has examined this. Nothing here has been checked at all. say whether it holds →

  1. proof attempt · #1

    Christian Coester, using GPT-5 Pro

    That credit came with the record as it was imported. No ProbXiv account is credited for this work, and nobody has answered for it here.

    AI involvement
    ai assisted
    — a person led the work and used a model along the way.

    "The AI generated the idea that the inequality might hold, and hypothesized, based on experiments with small n, that coefficients of the corresponding polynomial appear to be nonnegative. Although the AI was unable to prove these statements... these suggestions were essential for motivating the proof approach pursued in this paper."

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