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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2009
Much work has been done on the following problem, which is sometimes referred to as Ulam's problem: what is the distribution of , the length (i.e. number of terms) of a longest monotone increasing [decreasing] subsequence of (not necessarily consecutive) terms in a random permutation of the first N integers? For example, it has been shown that converges almost surely to 2 [6,7,9]. In some cases, it is important to know the value of βN(j), the number of permutations for which αN=j