Counting inversions, offline orthogonal range counting, and related problems
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We give an O(n √ lg n)-time algorithm for counting the number of inversions in a permutation on n elements. This improves a long-standing previous bound of O(n lg n / lg lg n) that followed from Dietz’s data structure [WADS’89], and answers a question of Andersson and Petersson [SODA’95]. As Dietz’s result is known to be optimal for the related dynamic rank problem, our result demonstrates a significant improvement in the offline setting. Our new technique is quite simple: we perform a “vertical partitioning ” of a trie (akin to van Emde Boas trees), and use ideas from external memory. However, the technique finds numerous applications: for example, we obtain • in d dimensions, an algorithm to answer n offline orthogonal range counting queries in time O(n lg d−2+1/d n); • an improved construction time for online data structures for orthogonal range counting; • an improved update time for the partial sums problem; • faster Word RAM algorithms for finding the maximum depth in an arrangement of axis-aligned rectangles, and for the slope selection problem. As a bonus, we also give a simple (1 + ε)-approximation algorithm for counting inversions that runs in linear time, improving the previous O(n lg lg n) bound by Andersson and Petersson.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it