The cook at the Frobbozz Magic Pancake House sometimes falls asleep on the job while cooking pancakes. As a result, one side of a stack of pancakes is often burned. Clearly, it is bad business to serve visibly burned pancakes to the patrons. Before serving, the waitress will arrange the stacks of pancakes so that the burned sides are facing down. You must write a program to aid the waitress in stacking the pancakes correctly.
We start with a stack of N pancakes of distinct sizes, each of which is burned on one side. The problem is to convert the stack to one in which the pancakes are in size order with the smallest on the top and the largest on the bottom and burned side down for each pancake. To do this, we are
allowed to flip the top k pancakes over as a unit (so the k-th pancake is now on top and the pancake previously on top is now in the k-th position and the burned side goes from top to bottom and vice versa).
For example (+ indicates burned bottom, - a burned top):
You must write a program which finds a sequence of at most (3n – 2) flips, which converts a given stack of pancakes to a sorted stack with burned sides down.