species-0.1: Combinatorial species library

Math.Combinatorics.Species.Unlabelled

Description

An interpretation of species as ordinary generating functions, which count unlabelled structures.

Synopsis

Documentation

unlabelled :: SpeciesAlg -> [Integer]Source

Extract the coefficients of an ordinary generating function as a list of Integers. In particular, unlabelled s !! n is the number of unlabelled s-structures on an underlying set of size n. For example:

 > take 10 $ unlabelled octopi
 [0,1,2,3,5,7,13,19,35,59]

gives the number of unlabelled octopi on 0, 1, 2, 3, ... 9 elements.

Actually, the above is something of a white lie, as you may have already realized by looking at the input type of unlabelled, which is SpeciesAlg rather than the expected GF. The reason is that although products and sums of unlabelled species correspond to products and sums of ordinary generating functions, composition and differentiation do not! In order to compute an ordinary generating function for a species defined in terms of composition and/or differentiation, we must compute the cycle index series for the species and then convert it to an ordinary generating function. So unlabelled actually works by first reifying the species to an AST and checking whether it uses composition or differentiation, and using operations on cycle index series if it does, and (much faster) operations directly on ordinary generating functions otherwise.