Related papers: First Passage Properties of the Polya Urn Process
A pair of planar polygons is "dancing" if one is inscribed in the other and they satisfy a certain cross-ratio relation at each vertex of the circumscribing polygon. Non-degenerate dancing pairs of closed $n$-gons exist for all $n\geq 6$.…
We consider a run-and-tumble particle on a half-line with an absorbing target at the origin. The particle has an internal velocity state that switches between two opposite values at Poisson-distributed times. The position of the particle…
All real physical processes, including of the first-passage time, occur with a change in entropy. This circumstance is not taken into account when studying the first-passage time, but is illustrated in this article using the example of…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
In recent years, it has been well-established that adding a restart mechanism can alter the firstpassage statistics of a stochastic processes in useful and interesting ways. Though different mecha-nisms have been investigated, we derive a…
In this paper we present a computation of the mean first-passage times both for a random walk in a discrete bounded lattice, between a starting site and a target site, and for a Brownian motion in a bounded domain, where the target is a…
The prediction of the final state probabilities of a general cuboid randomly thrown onto a surface is a problem that naturally arises in the minds of men and women familiar with regular cubic dice and the basic concepts of probability.…
We consider the allocation of $m$ balls (jobs) into $n$ bins (servers). In the Two-Choice process, for each of $m$ sequentially arriving balls, two randomly chosen bins are sampled and the ball is placed in the least loaded bin. It is…
We consider the classic infinite occupancy scheme, where balls are thrown in boxes independently, with probability $p_j$ of hitting box $j$. Each time a box receives its first ball we speak of a record and, more generally, call an…
In the classical leader election procedure all players toss coins independently and those who get tails leave the game, while those who get heads move to the next round where the procedure is repeated. We investigate a generalizion of this…
As an extension of Polya's classical result on random walks on the square grids ($\Z^d$), 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…
Counting votes is complex and error-prone. Several statistical methods have been developed to assess election accuracy by manually inspecting randomly selected physical ballots. Two 'principled' methods are risk-limiting audits (RLAs) and…
We study the two-player coupon-collector competition in which two independent collectors draw one coupon each per round from a set of $d$ equally likely coupon types. Myers and Wilf gave finite formulae for several two-player events and…
We consider first order expressible properties of random perfect graphs. That is, we pick a graph $G_n$ uniformly at random from all (labelled) perfect graphs on $n$ vertices and consider the probability that it satisfies some graph…
In a two-player game, two cooperating but non communicating players, Alice and Bob, receive inputs taken from a probability distribution. Each of them produces an output and they win the game if they satisfy some predicate on their…
A competition process is a continuous time Markov chain that can be interpreted as a system of interacting birth-and-death processes, the components of which evolve subject to a competitive interaction. This paper is devoted to the study of…
We present two complementary proofs that, if the lengths of $n$ sticks are sampled at random, then the probability that no $p+1$ sticks can form a $(p+1)$-sided polygon can be expressed as the product of the reciprocals of a series of terms…
Consider $2k-1$ voters, each of which has a preference ranking between $n$ given alternatives. An alternative $A$ is called a Condorcet winner, if it wins against every other alternative $B$ in majority voting (meaning that for every other…
We study the macroscopic geometry of first-passage competition on the integer lattice $Z^d$, with a particular interest in describing the behavior when one species initially occupies the exterior of a cone. First-passage competition is a…
The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…