Random walks with different directions: Drunkards beware !
Abstract
As an extension of Polya's classical result on random walks on the square grids (), we consider a random walk where the steps, while still have unit length, point to different directions. We show that in dimensions at least 4, the returning probability after steps is at most , which is sharp. The real surprise is in dimensions 2 and 3. In dimension 2, where the traditional grid walk is recurrent, our upper bound is , which is much worse than higher dimensions. In dimension 3, we prove an upper bound of order . We discover a new conjecture concerning incidences between spheres and points in , which, if holds, would improve the bound to , which is consistent % with the case. to the case. This conjecture resembles Szemer\'edi-Trotter type results and is of independent interest.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1409.7991,
title = {Random walks with different directions: Drunkards beware !},
author = {Simão Herdade and Van Vu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.7991},
year = {2016}
}