The distance of a permutation from a subgroup of S_n

Abstract

We show that the problem of computing the distance of a given permutation from a subgroup $H$ of $S_n$ is in general NP-complete, even under the restriction that $H$ is elementary Abelian of exponent 2. The problem is shown to be polynomial-time equivalent to a problem related to finding a maximal partition of the edges of an Eulerian directed graph into cycles and this problem is in turn equivalent to the standard NP-complete problem of Boolean satisfiability.