Related papers: Mixing times and moving targets

We establish the existence of optimal scheduling strategies for time-bounded reachability in continuous-time Markov decision processes, and of co-optimal strategies for continuous-time Markov games. Furthermore, we show that optimal control…

In this paper, we are interested in investigating the perturbation bounds for the stationary distributions for discrete-time or continuous-time Markov chains on a countable state space. For discrete-time Markov chains, two new norm-wise…

Monotonic surfaces spanning finite regions of $Z^d$ arise in many contexts, including DNA-based self-assembly, card-shuffling and lozenge tilings. One method that has been used to uniformly generate these surfaces is a Markov chain that…

We study time-bounded reachability in continuous-time Markov decision processes for time-abstract scheduler classes. Such reachability problems play a paramount role in dependability analysis and the modelling of manufacturing and queueing…

A concurrent system is defined as a monoid action of a trace monoid on a finite set of states. Concurrent systems represent state models where the state is distributed and where state changes are local. Starting from a spectral property on…

The mean time taken by an irreducible Markov chain on a finite state space to hit a target chosen at random according to the stationary distribution does not depend on the initial state of the chain. This mean time is known as Kemeny's…

An average-time game is played on the infinite graph of configurations of a finite timed automaton. The two players, Min and Max, construct an infinite run of the automaton by taking turns to perform a timed transition. Player Min wants to…

If $(C_n)$ is a Markov chain on a discrete state space ${\mathcal{S}}$, a Markov chain $(C_n,M_n)$ on the product space ${\mathcal{S}}\times{\mathcal{S}}$, the cat and mouse Markov chain, is constructed. The first coordinate of this Markov…

In this paper we study the distribution of hitting and return times for observations of dynamical systems. We apply this results to get an exponential law for the distribution of hitting and return times for rapidly mixing random dynamical…

We study 2-player zero-sum concurrent (i.e., simultaneous move) stochastic B\"uchi games and Transience games on countable graphs. Two players, Max and Min, seek respectively to maximize and minimize the probability of satisfying the game…

We study a generic family of two-player continuous-time nonzero-sum stopping games modeling a war of attrition with symmetric information and stochastic payoffs that depend on an homogeneous linear diffusion. We first show that any…

In this paper we compute the stopping times in the game Rock-Paper-Scissors. By exploiting the recurrence relation we compute the mean values of stopping times. On the other hand, by constructing a transition matrix for a Markov chain…

We investigate the convergence to (quasi--)equilibrium of a density dependent Markov chain in~${\mathbb Z}^d$, whose drift satisfies a system of ordinary differential equations having an attractive fixed point. For a sequence of such…

We consider the simple exclusion process with $k$ particles on a segment of length $N$ performing random walks with transition $p>1/2$ to the right and $q=1-p$ to the left. We focus on the case where the asymmetry in the jump rates…

Several inequalities are proved for the mixing time of discrete-time quantum walks on finite graphs. The mixing time is defined differently than in Aharonov, Ambainis, Kempe and Vazirani (2001) and it is found that for particular examples…

Three notions of random stopping times exist in the literature. We introduce two concepts of equivalence of random stopping times, motivated by optimal stopping problems and stopping games respectively. We prove that these two concepts…

In the Fastest Mixing Markov Chain problem, we are given a graph $G = (V, E)$ and desire the discrete-time Markov chain with smallest mixing time $\tau$ subject to having equilibrium distribution uniform on $V$ and non-zero transition…

We give a new rapid mixing result for a natural random walk on the independent sets of a graph $G$. We show that when $G$ has bounded treewidth, this random walk -- known as the Glauber dynamics for the hardcore model -- mixes rapidly for…

We consider the hard-core model with Metropolis transition probabilities on finite grid graphs and investigate the asymptotic behavior of the first hitting time between its two maximum-occupancy configurations in the low-temperature regime.…

Understanding the strategic behavior of miners in a blockchain is of great importance for its proper operation. A common model for mining games considers an infinite time horizon, with players optimizing asymptotic average objectives.…