English

Padlock Solitaire: A martingale trick for combinatorial enumeration

Combinatorics 2020-09-01 v1

Abstract

We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot theorems and the enumeration of spanning trees in various graphs and hypergraphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.13017,
  title  = {Padlock Solitaire: A martingale trick for combinatorial enumeration},
  author = {Johan Wästlund},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.13017},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

20 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:10:58.612Z