Related papers: Pachinko
Systems of pinned billiard balls serve as simplified models of collisions, where all particles remain fixed in their positions while their (pseudo-)velocities evolve in accordance with the laws of conservation of energy and momentum. For…
Break a stick at random at $n-1$ points to obtain $n$ pieces. We give an explicit formula for the probability that every choice of $k$ segments from this broken stick can form a $k$-gon, generalizing similar work. The method we use can be…
Astute variations in the geometry of mathematical billiard tables have been and continue to be a source of understanding their wide range of dynamical behaviors, from regular to chaotic. Viewing standard specular billiards in the broader…
We consider systems of "pinned balls," i.e., balls that have fixed positions and pseudo-velocities. Pseudo-velocities change according to the same rules as those for velocities of totally elastic collisions between moving balls. The times…
In the open circular billiard particles are placed initially with a uniform distribution in their positions inside a planar circular vesicle. They all have velocities of the same magnitude, whose initial directions are also uniformly…
We discuss the propagation of kinetic energy through billiard balls fixed in place along a one-dimensional segment. The number of billiard balls is assumed to be large but finite and we assume kinetic energy propagates following the usual…
We analyze the impact of two equal billiard balls in three ideal situations: when the balls freely slide on the plane of the billiard, when they roll without sliding and when one of them freely slides and the other rolls. In all the cases…
Balls-and-bins games have been a wildly successful tool for modeling load balancing problems. In this paper, we study a new scenario, which we call the ball recycling game, defined as follows: Throw m balls into n bins i.i.d. according to a…
H${\acute{e}}$non [8] used an inclined billiard to investigate aspects of chaotic scattering which occur in satellite encounters and in other situations. His model consisted of a piecewise mapping which described the motion of a point…
A three-parameter discrete distribution is developed to describe the multiplicity distributions observed in total- and limited phase space volumes in different collision processes. The probability law is obtained by the Poisson transform of…
We call a system bouncing ball billiard if it consists of a particle that is subjected to a constant vertical force and bounces inelastically on a one-dimendional vibrating periodically corrugated floor. Here we choose circular scatterers…
An urn scheme is a probabilistic model in which balls are placed into urns sequentially and independently of each other. All balls share the same probability distribution for hitting the urns. In the simplest case, there is a finite number…
Although exchangeable processes from Bayesian nonparametrics have been used as a generating mechanism for random partition models, we deviate from this paradigm to explicitly incorporate clustering information in the formulation of our…
We examine a family of discrete probability distributions that describes the "spillage number" in the extended balls-in-bins model. The spillage number is defined as the number of balls that occupy their bins minus the total number of…
A discrete-time stochastic process derived from a model of basketball is used to generalize any discrete distribution. The generalized distributions can have one or two more parameters than the parent distribution. Those derived from…
Have you ever taken a disputed decision by tossing a coin and checking its landing side? This ancestral "heads or tails" practice is still widely used when facing undecided alternatives since it relies on the intuitive fairness of…
We study a model inspired by the pinball machine involving chaotic scattering of particles on hard disks with inelasticity. This system exhibits sensitivity not only on the initial conditions of the scattering point particle but also on the…
Assume that $2n$ balls are thrown independently and uniformly at random into $n$ bins. We consider the unlikely event $E$ that every bin receives at least one ball, showing that $\Pr[E] = \Theta(b^n)$ where $b \approx 0.836$. Note that, due…
Let $\mathfrak{C}$ be a class of probability distributions over the discrete domain $[n] = \{1,...,n\}.$ We show that if $\mathfrak{C}$ satisfies a rather general condition -- essentially, that each distribution in $\mathfrak{C}$ can be…
Spin glasses are fundamental probability distributions at the core of statistical physics, the theory of average-case computational complexity, and modern high-dimensional statistical inference. In the mean-field setting, we design…