Related papers: Carries, Shuffling and An Amazing Matrix

Consider shuffling a deck of $n$ cards, labeled $1$ through $n$, as follows: at each time step, pick one card uniformly with your right hand and another card, independently and uniformly with your left hand; then swap the cards. How long…

Let H be a subgroup of a finite group G. We use Markov chains to quantify how large r should be so that the decomposition of the r tensor power of the representation of G on cosets on H behaves (after renormalization) like the regular…

Divide a deck of $kn$ cards into $k$ equal piles and place them from left to right. The standard shuffle $\sigma$ is performed by picking up the top cards one by one from left to right and repeating until all cards have been picked up. For…

Markov chain Monte Carlo is a widely-used technique for generating a dependent sequence of samples from complex distributions. Conventionally, these methods require a source of independent random variates. Most implementations use…

In late May of 2014 I received an email from a colleague introducing to me a non-transitive game developed by Walter Penney. This paper explores this probability game from the perspective of a coin tossing game, and further discusses some…

Markov chains are a class of probabilistic models that have achieved widespread application in the quantitative sciences. This is in part due to their versatility, but is compounded by the ease with which they can be probed analytically.…

A new model that maps a quantum random walk described by a Hadamard operator to a particular case of a random walk is presented. The model is represented by a Markov chain with a stochastic matrix, i.e., all the transition rates are…

An edge switch is an operation which makes a local change in a graph while maintaining the degree of every vertex. We introduce a switch move, called a triangle switch, which creates or deletes at least one triangle. Specifically, a make…

We explore the cycle types of a class of biased random derangements, described as a random game played by some children labeled $1,\cdots,n$. Children join the game one by one, in a random order, and randomly form some circles of size at…

In the last few years several new Random Matrix Models have been proposed and studied. They have found application in various different contexts, ranging from the physics of mesoscopic systems to the chiral transition in lattice gauge…

If we want to represent integers in base $m$, we need a set $A$ of digits, which needs to be a complete set of residues modulo $m$. When adding two integers with last digits $a_1, a_2 \in A$, we find the unique $a \in A$ such that $a_1 +…

The rotor-router model is a deterministic process analogous to a simple random walk on a graph. This paper is concerned with a generalized model, functional-router model, which imitates a Markov chain possibly containing irrational…

We give a set of equivalent conditions for a potential on a Countable Markov Shift to have strong positive recurrence, which is also equivalent to having exponential decay of correlations. A key ingredient of our proofs is quantifying how…

We consider the following card guessing game with no feedback. An ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards. One after…

It is well known that martingale transport plans between marginals $\mu\neq\nu$ are never given by Monge maps -- with the understanding that the map is over the first marginal $\mu$, or forward in time. Here, we change the perspective, with…

A closed plane meander of order $n$ is a closed self-avoiding curve intersecting an infinite line $2n$ times. Meanders are considered distinct up to any smooth deformation leaving the line fixed. We have developed an improved algorithm,…

Two notions of riffle shuffling on finite Coxeter groups are given: one using Solomon's descent algebra and another using random walk on chambers of hyperplane arrangements. These coincide for types $A$,$B$,$C$, $H_3$, and rank two groups.…

In this paper, we propose a new Markov chain which generalizes random-to-random shuffling on permutations to random-to-random shuffling on linear extensions of a finite poset of size $n$. We conjecture that the second largest eigenvalue of…

Standard perfect shuffles involve splitting a deck of $2n$ cards into two stacks and interlacing the cards from the stacks. There are two ways that this interlacing can be done, commonly referred to as an in shuffle and an out shuffle,…

The act of a person juggling can be viewed as a Markov process if we assume that the juggler throws to random heights. I make this association for the simplest reasonable model of random juggling and compute the steady state probabilities…