In a single-shelf library of N books we suppose that books are selected one at a time and returned to the k th position on the shelf before another selection is made. Books are moved to the right or left as necessary to vacate position k . The probability of selecting each book is assumed to be known, and the N ! arrangements of the books are considered as states of an ergodic Markov chain for which we find the stationary distribution.
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W. J. Hendricks (1973) studied this question.
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