Bruhat intervals that are large hypercubes

Abstract

We study the question of finding big Bruhat intervals that are poset hypercubes in the symmetric group $S_n$. Using permutations suggested by AlphaEvolve (an evolutionary coding agent developed by Google DeepMind), we were led to an unusual situation in which the agent produced a pattern which performed well for the $n$ tested, and which we show works well for general $n$. When $n$ is a power of 2 we exhibit a hypercube of dimension $O(n\log n)$, matching the largest possible dimension up to a constant multiple. Furthermore, we give an exact characterization of the vertices of this hypercube: they are precisely the \emph{dyadically well-distributed} permutations -- a simple digitwise property that already appeared in connection with Monte Carlo integration and mathematical finance. The maximal dimension of a Bruhat interval that is an hypercube in $S_n$ gives a lower bound (and possibly is equal to) the maximal possible coefficient of the second-highest degree term in the Kazhdan--Lusztig $R$-polynomial in $S_n$. As a surprising consequence, we obtain a new lower bound of order $n\log n$ for the maximal number of frozen variables appearing in the cluster algebras attached to the open Richardson varieties in $S_n$, and a similar result for moduli spaces of embeddings of Bruhat graphs.