We study the lengths of monotone subsequences for permutations drawn from the Mallows measure. The Mallows measure was introduced by Mallows in connection with ranking problems in statistics. Under this measure, the probability of a permutation @math is proportional to @math where @math is a positive parameter and @math is the number of inversions in @math . In our main result we show that when @math , the limiting distribution of the longest increasing subsequence (LIS) is Gaussian, answering an open question in [Bhatnagar and Peled, PTRF, 2015]. This is in contrast to the case when @math where the limiting distribution of the LIS when scaled appropriately is the GUE Tracy-Widom distribution. We also obtain a law of large numbers for the length of the longest decreasing subsequence (LDS) and identify the precise constant in the order of the expectation, answering a further open question in [Bhatnagar and Peled, PTRF, 2015].
When faced with a complex task, is it better to be systematic or to proceed by making random adjustments? We study aspects of this problem in the context of generating random elements of a finite group. For example, suppose we want to fill n empty spaces with zeros and ones such that the probability of configuration x = (x1, . . . , xn) is θ n−|x|(1− θ)|x|, with |x| the number of ones in x. A systematic scan approach works left to right, filling each successive place with a θ coin toss. A random scan approach picks places at random, and a given site may be hit many times before all sites are hit. The systematic approach takes order n steps and the random approach takes order 1 4n log n steps. Realistic versions of this toy problem arise in image analysis and Ising-like simulations, where one must generate a random array by a Monte Carlo Markov chain. Systematic updating and random updating are competing algorithms that are discussed in detail in Section 2. There are some successful analyses for random scan algorithms, but the intuitively appealing systematic scan algorithms have resisted analysis. Our main results show that the binary problem just described is exceptional; for the examples analyzed in this paper, systematic and random scans converge in about the same number of steps. Let W be a finite Coxeter group generated by simple reflections s1, s2, . . . , sn, where s2 i = id. For example, W may be the permutation group Sn+1 with si = (i, i + 1). The length function (w) is the smallest k such that w = si1si2 · · · sik . Fix 0 < θ ≤ 1 and define a probability distribution on W by π(w) = θ − (w) PW (θ−1) , where PW(θ −1) = ∑