To put this in context: I am in the process of developing a package for Macaulay 2 (a commutative algebra software,) called "Permutations", which will add permutations as a type of combinatorial object that M2 will handle, hopefully integrating nicely with the (still in development) Posets package, the (still in development) Graphs package, and various current M2 functions.
One of the first things that I'd wanted to put in was functions which compute the poset of the Bruhat order on $S_n$ and compute when one permutation covers another in the Bruhat order. This was all coded and "working" - but has been producing a poset which is decidedly NOT the desired poset (among other things, the graph of the Hasse diagram isn't regular.) I'd like to ask whether the (probably somewhat naive) algorithm I was using to check covering relations seems reasonable (so the problem is just in the coding of it, not in the theory behind it) or not.
To see if $P\leq R$ in the Bruhat order:
Given a pair of permutations P and R, compute their lengths (the number of simple transpositions in their decomposition, or [as implemented right now] the sum of entries in their inversion vectors.) If length(P)=length(R)+1, then we compute $(P^{-1})*R$.
If R covers P in the Bruhat order, then length$((P^{-1})*R)=1.$
Am I missing some subtlety of the Bruhat order? I thought one permutation covered enough exactly when they differed by a single, simple transposition. This seemed to capture that - but is giving me an incorrect poset.
Coding error or theory error? I'd love to hear it.