English

Reconstructing random jigsaws

Combinatorics 2017-07-18 v1 Probability

Abstract

A colouring of the edges of an n×nn \times n grid is said to be \emph{reconstructible} if the colouring is uniquely determined by the multiset of its n2n^2 \emph{tiles}, where the tile corresponding to a vertex of the grid specifies the colours of the edges incident to that vertex in some fixed order. In 2015, Mossel and Ross asked the following question: if the edges of an n×nn \times n grid are coloured independently and uniformly at random using q=q(n)q=q(n) different colours, then is the resulting colouring reconstructible with high probability? From below, Mossel and Ross showed that such a colouring is not reconstructible when q=o(n2/3)q = o(n^{2/3}) and from above, Bordenave, Feige and Mossel and Nenadov, Pfister and Steger independently showed, for any fixed ϵ>0\epsilon > 0, that such a colouring is reconstructible when qn1+ϵq \ge n^{1+\epsilon}. Here, we improve on these results and prove the following: there exist absolute constants C,c>0C, c > 0 such that, as nn \to \infty, the probability that a random colouring as above is reconstructible tends to 11 if qCnq \ge Cn and to 00 if qcnq \le cn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1707.04730,
  title  = {Reconstructing random jigsaws},
  author = {Paul Balister and Béla Bollobás and Bhargav Narayanan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.04730},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

25 pages, 1 figure, submitted