circular shift

Article summary

In combinatorial mathematics, a circular shift is the operation of rearranging the entries in a tuple, either by moving the final entry to the first position, while shifting all other entries to the next position, or by performing the inverse operation. A circular shift is a special kind of cyclic permutation, which in turn is a special kind of permutation. Formally, a circular shift is a permutation σ of the n entries in the tuple such that either : \sigma(i)\equiv (i+1) modulo n, for all entries i = 1, ..., n or : \sigma(i)\equiv (i-1) modulo n, for all entries i = 1, ..., n. The result of repeatedly applying circular shifts to a given tuple are also called the circular shifts of the tuple. For example, repeatedly applying circular shifts to the four-tuple (a, b, c, d) successively gives * (d, a, b, c), * (c, d, a, b), * (b, c, d, a), * (a, b, c, d) (the original four-tuple), and then the sequence repeats; this four-tuple therefore has four distinct circular shifts. However, not all n-tuples have n distinct circular shifts. For instance, the 4-tuple (a, b, a, b) only has 2 distinct circular shifts. The number of distinct circular shifts of an n-tuple is \frac{n}{k} , where is a divisor of , indicating the maximal number of repeats over all subpatterns.…

Key claims

No claims recorded.

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

No sources recorded.