Yet another sorting problem! In this one, you’re given a sequence S of N distinct integers and are asked to sort it with minimum cost using only one operation:
The Manhattan swap!
Let Si and Sj be two elements of the sequence at positions i and j respectively, applying the Manhattan swap operation to Si and Sj swaps both elements with a cost of |i-j|. For example, given the sequence {9,5,3}, we can sort the sequence with a single Manhattan swap operation by swapping the first and last elements for a total cost of 2 (absolute difference between positions of 9 and 3).