Related papers: Riffle shuffles of a deck with repeated cards
The Thorp shuffle is defined as follows. Cut the deck into two equal piles. Drop the first card from the left pile or the right pile according to the outcome of a fair coin flip; then drop from the other pile. Continue this way until both…
A sink-free orientation of a finite undirected graph is a choice of orientation for each edge such that every vertex has out-degree at least 1. Bubley and Dyer (1997) use Markov Chain Monte Carlo to sample approximately from the uniform…
Various card tricks involve under-down dealing, where alternatively one card is placed under the deck and the next card is dealt. We study how the cards need to be prepared in the deck to be dealt in order. The order in which the $N$ cards…
The switch Markov chain has been extensively studied as the most natural Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach for sampling graphs with prescribed degree sequences. We use comparison arguments with other, less natural but simpler to analyze,…
Consider $n$ independent, biased coins, each with a known probability of heads. Presented with an ordering of these coins, flip (i.e., toss) each coin once, in that order, until we have observed both a *head* and a *tail*, or flipped all…
E. Thorp introduced the following card shuffling model. Suppose the number of cards $n$ is even. Cut the deck into two equal piles. Drop the first card from the left pile or from the right pile according to the outcome of a fair coin flip.…
The theory of dense graph limits comes with a natural sampling process which yields an inhomogeneous variant G(n,W) of the Erdos-Renyi random graph. Here we study the clique number of these random graphs. We establish the concentration of…
In this thesis the properties of two kinds of non-uniform random recursive trees are studied. In the first model weights are assigned to each node, thus altering the attachment probabilities. We will call these trees weighted recursive…
The book graph $B_n^{(k)}$ consists of $n$ copies of $K_{k+1}$ joined along a common $K_k$. The Ramsey numbers of $B_n^{(k)}$ are known to have strong connections to the classical Ramsey numbers of cliques. Recently, the first author…
We revisit the classic 'guess my number' game and extend it from its familiar binary form to representations in any integer base. For each base we derive formulas for the number of cards needed to identify a given integer and, conversely,…
Representing distributions over permutations can be a daunting task due to the fact that the number of permutations of $n$ objects scales factorially in $n$. One recent way that has been used to reduce storage complexity has been to exploit…
Consider a sequence (indexed by n) of Markov chains Z^n in R^d characterized by transition kernels that approximately (in n) depend only on the rescaled state n^{-1} Z^n. Subject to a smoothness condition, such a family can be closely…
We consider a card guessing strategy for a stack of cards with two different types of cards, say $m_1$ cards of type red (heart or diamond) and $m_2$ cards of type black (clubs or spades). Given a deck of $M=m_1+m_2$ cards, we propose a…
We estimate numerically the regularities of a family of Strange Non--Chaotic Attractors related with one of the models studied in C. Grebogy et al. (1984) (see also G. Keller (1996)). To estimate these regularities we use wavelet analysis…
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
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…
When we want to simulate the realization of a symmetric simple random walk on $\mathbb Z^d$, we use $(2d)$-side fair dice to decide to which neighbor it jumps at each step if $d\geq 2$ or we simply use a fair coin when $d=1$. Assume that…
We study the asymptotic behavior of the clique number in rank-1 inhomogeneous random graphs, where edge probabilities between vertices are roughly proportional to the product of their vertex weights. We show that the clique number is…
The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of (undirected, or directed) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the…
We study the perfect matching reconfiguration problem: Given two perfect matchings of a graph, is there a sequence of flip operations that transforms one into the other? Here, a flip operation exchanges the edges in an alternating cycle of…