On Instance-Optimal Algorithms for a Generalization of Nuts and Bolts and Generalized Sorting

We generalize the classical nuts and bolts problem to a setting where the input is a collection of n nuts and m bolts, and there is no promise of any matching pairs. It is not allowed to compare a nut directly with a nut or a bolt directly with a bolt, and the goal is to perform the fewest nut-bolt comparisons to discover the partial order between the nuts and bolts. We term this problem bipartite sorting. We show that instances of bipartite sorting of the same size exhibit a wide range of complexity, and propose to perform a fine-grained analysis for this problem. We rule out straightforward notions of instance-optimality as being too stringent, and adopt a neighborhood-based definition. Our definition may be of independent interest as a unifying lens for instance-optimal algorithms for other static problems existing in literature. This includes problems like sorting (Estivill-Castro and Woods, ACM Comput. Surv. 1992), convex hull (Afshani, Barbay and Chan, JACM 2017), adaptive joins (Demaine, López-Ortiz and Munro, SODA 2000), and the recent concept of universal optimality for graphs (Haeupler, Hladík, Rozhoň, Tarjan and Tětek, 2023). As our main result on bipartite sorting, we give a randomized algorithm that is within a factor of O(log³(n+m)) of being instance-optimal w.h.p., with respect to the neighborhood-based definition. As our second contribution, we generalize bipartite sorting to DAG sorting, when the underlying DAG is not necessarily bipartite. As an unexpected consequence of a simple algorithm for DAG sorting, we rule out a potential lower bound on the widely-studied problem of sorting with priced information, posed by (Charikar, Fagin, Guruswami, Kleinberg, Raghavan and Sahai, STOC 2000). In this problem, comparing keys i and j has a known cost c_{ij} ∈ ℝ^+ ∪ {∞}, and the goal is to sort the keys in an instance-optimal way, by keeping the total cost of an algorithm as close as possible to ∑_{i=1}^{n-1} c_{x(i)x(i+1)}. Here x(1) < ⋯ < x(n) is the sorted order. While several special cases of cost functions have received a lot of attention in the community, no progress on the general version with arbitrary costs has been reported so far. One reason for this lack of progress seems to be a widely-cited Ω(n) lower bound on the competitive ratio for finding the maximum. This Ω(n) lower bound by (Gupta and Kumar, FOCS 2000) uses costs in {0,1,n, ∞}, and although not extended to sorting, this barrier seems to have stalled any progress on the general cost case. We rule out such a potential lower bound by showing the existence of an algorithm with a Õ(n^{3/4}) competitive ratio for the {0,1,n,∞} cost version. This generalizes the setting of generalized sorting proposed by (Huang, Kannan and Khanna, FOCS 2011), where the costs are either 1 or infinity, and the cost of the cheapest proof is always n-1.