English

Chip Firing on Directed $k$-ary Trees

Combinatorics 2024-10-31 v1

Abstract

Chip-firing is a combinatorial game played on a graph in which we place and disperse chips on vertices until a stable state is reached. We study a chip-firing variant played on an infinite rooted directed kk-ary tree, where we place kk^\ell chips on the root for some positive integer \ell, and we say a vertex vv can fire if it has at least kk chips. A vertex fires by dispersing one chip to each out-neighbor. Once every vertex has less than kk chips, we reach a stable configuration since no vertex can fire. We determine the exact number and properties of the possible stable configurations of chips in the setting where chips are distinguishable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.23265,
  title  = {Chip Firing on Directed $k$-ary Trees},
  author = {Ryota Inagaki and Tanya Khovanova and Austin Luo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.23265},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 pages, 6 Figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:41:46.284Z