Search Results

Sorting is a foundational problem in computer science that is typically employed on sequences or total orders. More recently, a more general form of sorting on partially ordered sets (or posets), where some pairs of elements are incomparable, has been studied. General poset sorting algorithms have a lower-bound query complexity of Ω(wn + n log n), where w is the width of the poset. We consider the problem of sorting in trees, a particular case of partial orders. This problem is equivalent to the problem of reconstructing a rooted directed tree from path queries. We parametrize the complexity with respect to d, the maximum degree of an element in the tree, as d is usually much smaller than w in trees. For example, in complete binary trees, d = Θ(1), w = Θ(n). The previous known upper bounds are O(dn log² n) [Wang and Honorio, 2019] and O(d² n log n) [Ramtin Afshar et al., 2020], and a recent paper proves a lower bound of Ω(dn log_d n) [Paul Bastide, 2023] for any Las Vegas randomized algorithm. In this paper, we settle the complexity of the problem by presenting a randomized algorithm with worst-case expected O(dnlog_d n) query and time complexity.