Partial shuffles by lazy swaps
Abstract
What is the smallest number of random transpositions (meaning that we swap given pairs of elements with given probabilities) that we can make on an -point set to ensure that each element is uniformly distributed -- in the sense that the probability that is mapped to is for all and ? And what if we insist that each pair is uniformly distributed? In this paper we show that the minimum for the first problem is about , with this being exact when is a power of . For the second problem, we show that, rather surprisingly, the answer is not quadratic: random transpositions suffice. We also show that if we ask only that the pair is uniformly distributed then the answer is . This proves a conjecture of Groenland, Johnston, Radcliffe and Scott.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2210.13286,
title = {Partial shuffles by lazy swaps},
author = {Barnabás Janzer and J. Robert Johnson and Imre Leader},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.13286},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
15 pages