# Proving that a random permutation generator is not fair [closed]

If I'm generating random permutations using the following algorithm:

start with p = identity permutation.
at each iteration,
pick two random numbers i,j from {1,2... n}
swap p(i) with p(j).
repeat m times, and m is large as you wish.


My guess is that this method is not fair. Namely, not all permutations are chosen with probability of 1/n!.

Because for simpler permutations, there is greater room for choice, but I just cannot prove it

Any idea? thanks!

## closed as off-topic by Emil Jeřábek, Andrej Bauer, Aryeh, Kaveh, Hsien-Chih Chang 張顯之Nov 25 '17 at 5:20

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If $m$ is fixed while $n$ grows to infinity, then it's easy to see this algorithm doesn't produce a uniformly random permutation: it produces a permutation whose bubble-sort distance from the identity is at most $m$, while a random permutation has expected distance $\frac{n}{2}$ from the identity.
However, when $m$ is allowed to grow with $n$, this algorithm samples from a distribution on permutations which quickly gets very close to uniform. Indeed, this algorithm takes $m$ steps from a natural reversible Markov chain on the symmetric group whose stationary distribution is the uniform distribution. A classical result of Diaconis and Shahshahani shows that the total variation distance between the distribution $\mathbb{P}_m$ on the permutation output by the algorithm after $m$ steps, and the uniform distribution $\mathbb{P}_U$ is
$$2\left(\frac1e - e^{-e^{-2c}}\right) + o(1) \le \frac12 \|\mathbb{P}_m - \mathbb{P}_Y\|_1 \lesssim e^{-2c},$$
$$c = \frac{m - \frac12 n\log n}{n}.$$