Count the number of permutations that have a specific number of inversions.
Given a permutation a1, a2, a3,..., an of the n integers 1, 2, 3, ..., n, an inversion is a pair (ai, aj) where i < j and ai > aj. The number of inversions in a permutation gives an indication on how "unsorted" a permutation is. If we wish to analyze the average running time of a sorting algorithm, it is often useful to know how many permutations of n objects will have a certain number of inversions.
In this problem you are asked to compute the number of permutations of n values that have exactly k inversions.
For example, if n = 3, there are 6 permutations with the indicated inversions as follows:
123 0 inversions
132 1 inversion (3 > 2)
213 1 inversion (2 > 1)
231 2 inversions (2 > 1, 3 > 1)
312 2 inversions (3 > 1, 3 > 2)
321 3 inversions (3 > 2, 3 > 1, 2 > 1)
Therefore, for the permutations of 3 things
- 1 of them has 0 inversions
- 2 of them have 1 inversion
- 2 of them have 2 inversions
- 1 of them has 3 inversions
- 0 of them have 4 inversions
- 0 of them have 5 inversions
- etc.