We consider the following general model of a sorting procedure: we fix a hereditary permutation class C, which corresponds to the operations that the procedure is allowed to perform in a single step. The input of sorting is a permutation π of the set [n] = {1, 2,…,n}, i.e., a sequence where each element of [n] appears once. In every step, the sorting procedure picks a permutation σ of length n from C, and rearranges the current permutation of numbers by composing it with σ. The goal is to transform the input π into the sorted sequence 1, 2,…,n in as few steps as possible.

Weak and strong coloring numbers are generalizations of the degeneracy of a graph, where for each natural number $k$, we seek a vertex ordering such every vertex can (weakly respectively strongly) reach in $k$ steps only few vertices with lower index in the ordering. Both notions capture the sparsity of a graph or a graph class, and have interesting applications in the structural and algorithmic graph theory. Recently, the first author together with McCarty and Norin observed a natural volume-based upper bound for the strong coloring numbers of intersection graphs of well-behaved objects in $\mathbb{R}^d$, such as homothets of a centrally symmetric compact convex object, or comparable axis-aligned boxes. In this paper, we prove upper and lower bounds for the $k$-th weak coloring numbers of these classes of intersection graphs. As a consequence, we describe a natural graph class whose strong coloring numbers are polynomial in $k$, but the weak coloring numbers are exponential. We also observe a surprising difference in terms of the dependence of the weak coloring numbers on the dimension between touching graphs of balls (single-exponential) and hypercubes (double-exponential).

We study the counting problem known as #PPM, whose input is a pair of permutations $π$ and $τ$ (called pattern and text, respectively), and the task is to find the number of subsequences of $τ$ that have the same relative order as $π$. A simple brute-force approach solves #PPM for a pattern of length $k$ and a text of length $n$ in time $O(n^{k+1})$, while Berendsohn, Kozma and Marx have recently shown that under the exponential time hypothesis (ETH), it cannot be solved in time $f(k) n^{o(k/\log k)}$ for any function $f$. In this paper, we consider the restriction of #PPM, known as $\mathcal{C}$-Pattern #PPM, where the pattern $π$ must belong to a hereditary permutation class $\mathcal{C}$. Our goal is to identify the structural properties of $\mathcal{C}$ that determine the complexity of $\mathcal{C}$-Pattern #PPM. We focus on two such structural properties, known as the long path property (LPP) and the deep tree property (DTP). Assuming ETH, we obtain these results: 1. If $C$ has the LPP, then $\mathcal{C}$-Pattern #PPM cannot be solved in time $f(k)n^{o(\sqrt{k})}$ for any function $f$, and 2. if $C$ has the DTP, then $\mathcal{C}$-Pattern #PPM cannot be solved in time $f(k)n^{o(k/\log^2 k)}$ for any function $f$. Furthermore, when $\mathcal{C}$ is one of the so-called monotone grid classes, we show that if $\mathcal{C}$ has the LPP but not the DTP, then $\mathcal{C}$-Pattern #PPM can be solved in time $f(k)n^{O(\sqrt k)}$. In particular, the lower bounds above are tight up to the polylog terms in the exponents.

We study the complexity of the decision problem known as Permutation Pattern Matching, or PPM. The input of PPM consists of a pair of permutations τ (the "text") and π (the "pattern"), and the goal is to decide whether τ contains π as a subpermutation. On general inputs, PPM is known to be NP-complete by a result of Bose, Buss and Lubiw. In this paper, we focus on restricted instances of PPM where the text is assumed to avoid a fixed (small) pattern σ; this restriction is known as Av(σ)-PPM. It has been previously shown that Av(σ)-PPM is polynomial for any σ of size at most 3, while it is NP-hard for any σ containing a monotone subsequence of length four. In this paper, we present a new hardness reduction which allows us to show, in a uniform way, that Av(σ)-PPM is hard for every σ of size at least 6, for every σ of size 5 except the symmetry class of 41352, as well as for every σ symmetric to one of the three permutations 4321, 4312 and 4231. Moreover, assuming the exponential time hypothesis, none of these hard cases of Av(σ)-PPM can be solved in time 2^o(n/log n). Previously, such conditional lower bound was not known even for the unconstrained PPM problem. On the tractability side, we combine the CSP approach of Guillemot and Marx with the structural results of Huczynska and Vatter to show that for any monotone-griddable permutation class 𝒞, PPM is polynomial when the text is restricted to a permutation from 𝒞.

Permutation Pattern Matching (PPM) is the problem of deciding for a given pair of permutations P and T whether the pattern P is contained in the text T. Bose, Buss and Lubiw showed that PPM is NP-complete. In view of this result, it is natural to ask how the situation changes when we restrict the pattern P to a fixed permutation class C; this is known as the C-Pattern PPM problem. Grid classes are special kind of permutation classes, consisting of permutations admitting a grid-like decomposition into simpler building blocks. Of particular interest are the so-called monotone grid classes, in which each building block is a monotone sequence. Recently, it has been discovered that grid classes, especially the monotone ones, play a fundamental role in the understanding of the structure of general permutation classes. This motivates us to study the hardness of C-Pattern PPM for a (monotone) grid class C. We provide a complexity dichotomy for C-Pattern PPM when C is taken to be a monotone grid class. Specifically, we show that the problem is polynomial-time solvable if a certain graph associated with C, called the cell graph, is a forest, and it is NP-complete otherwise. We further generalize our results to grid classes whose blocks belong to classes of bounded grid-width. We show that the C-Pattern PPM for such a grid class C is polynomial-time solvable if the cell graph of C avoids a cycle or a certain special type of path, and it is NP-complete otherwise.