English

Percolation games on rooted, edge-weighted random trees

Probability 2025-01-16 v2

Abstract

Consider a rooted Galton-Watson tree TT, to each of whose edges we assign, independently, a weight that equals +1+1 with probability p1p_{1}, 00 with probability p0p_{0} and 1-1 with probability p1=1p1p0p_{-1}=1-p_{1}-p_{0}. We play a game on a realization of this tree, involving two players and a token that is allowed to be moved from where it is currently located, say a vertex uu of TT, to any child vv of uu. The players begin with initial capitals that amount to ii and jj units respectively, and a player wins if either she is the first to amass a capital worth κ\kappa units, where κN\kappa \in \mathbb{N} is prespecified, or she is able to move the token to a leaf vertex, from where her opponent cannot move it any farther, or her opponent's capital is the first to dwindle to 00. This paper is concerned with analyzing the probabilities of the three possible outcomes such a game may culminate in, as well as with finding conditions under which the expected duration of the game is finite. Of particular interest to us is the exploration of criteria that guarantee the probability of draw in such a game to be 00. The theory we develop is further supported by observations obtained via computer simulations, providing a deeper insight into how the above-mentioned probabilities behave as the underlying parameters and / or offspring distributions are allowed to vary. We include in this paper conjectures pertaining to the behaviour of the probability of draw in our game (including a phase transition phenomenon, in which the probability of draw goes from being 00 to being strictly positive) as the parameter-pair (p0,p1)(p_{0},p_{1}) is varied suitably while keeping the underlying offspring distribution of TT fixed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.00831,
  title  = {Percolation games on rooted, edge-weighted random trees},
  author = {Sayar Karmakar and Moumanti Podder and Souvik Roy and Soumyarup Sadhukhan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.00831},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

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R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:50:16.711Z