The Sequence Reconstruction of Permutations under Hamming Metric with Small Errors

Abstract

The sequence reconstruction problem asks for the recovery of a sequence from multiple noisy copies, where each copy may contain up to $r$ errors. In the case of permutations on \(n\) letters under the Hamming metric, this problem is closely related to the parameter $N(n,r)$, the maximum intersection size of two Hamming balls of radius $r$. While previous work has resolved \(N(n,r)\) for small radii (\(r \leq 4\)) and established asymptotic bounds for larger \(r\), we present new exact formulas for \(r \in \{5,6,7\}\) using group action techniques. In addition, we develop a formula for \(N(n,r)\) based on the irreducible characters of the symmetric group \(S_n\), along with an algorithm that enables computation of \(N(n,r)\) for larger parameters, including cases such as \(N(43,8)\) and \(N(24,14)\).