English

Random walks with different directions: Drunkards beware !

Combinatorics 2016-08-10 v1 Probability

Abstract

As an extension of Polya's classical result on random walks on the square grids (Zd\Z^d), 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 nn steps is at most nd/2d/(d2)+o(1)n^{-d/2 - d/(d-2) +o(1)}, 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 nω(1)n^{-\omega (1)}, which is much worse than higher dimensions. In dimension 3, we prove an upper bound of order n4+o(1)n^{-4 +o(1)}. We discover a new conjecture concerning incidences between spheres and points in R3\R^3, which, if holds, would improve the bound to n9/2+o(1)n^{-9/2 +o(1)}, which is consistent % with the d4d \ge 4 case. to the d4d \ge 4 case. This conjecture resembles Szemer\'edi-Trotter type results and is of independent interest.

Keywords

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}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:07:57.154Z