Related papers: Pachinko
When a thick cylindrical coin is tossed in the air and lands without bouncing on an inelastic substrate, it ends up on its face or its side. We account for the rigid body dynamics of spin and precession and calculate the probability…
We illustrate how to invite and excite students about research by exploring higher-dimensional generalizations of the classical egg drop problem, in which the goal is to locate a critical breaking point using the fewest number of trials.…
We consider the urn setting with two different objects, ``good'' and ``bad'', and analyze the number of draws without replacement until a good object is picked. Although the expected number of draws for this setting is a standard textbook…
A classical problem in statistics is estimating the expected coverage of a sample, which has had applications in gene expression, microbial ecology, optimization, and even numismatics. Here we consider a related extension of this problem to…
We study the dynamics of a bouncing coin whose motion is restricted to the two-dimensional plane. Such coin model is equivalent to the system of two equal masses connected by a rigid rod, making elastic collisions with a flat boundary. We…
We find the asymptotic total variation distance between two distributions on configurations of m balls in n labeled bins: in the first, each ball is placed in a bin uniformly at random; in the second, k balls are planted in an arbitrary but…
We study the dynamics of billiard models with a modified collision rule: the outgoing angle from a collision is a uniform contraction, by a factor lambda, of the incident angle. These pinball billiards interpolate between a one-dimensional…
The shape of a drop pinned in a local equilibrium on an incline is a long-standing problem. The substrate can be homogeneous or heterogeneous and we herewith consider a drop pinned on an incline at the junction between a hydrophilic…
Billiards tables - a minimal model for particles moving in a confined region - are known to present classical (and quantum) different features according to their shape, ranging from strongly chaotic to integrable dynamics. Here we consider…
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…
A partially parallel dynamical noisy binary choice (Ising) game in discrete time of $N$ players on complete graphs with $k$ players having a possibility of changing their strategies at each time moment called $k$-flip Ising game is…
Balls-in-bins models describe a random sequential allocation of infinitely many balls into a finite number of bins. In these models a ball is placed into a bin with probability proportional to a given function (feedback function), which…
A simple relation is developed between elastic collisions of freely-moving point particles in one dimension and a corresponding billiard system. For two particles with masses m_1 and m_2 on the half-line x>0 that approach an elastic barrier…
Metrics for rigorously defining a distance between two events have been used to study the properties of the dataspace manifold of particle collider physics. The probability distribution of pairwise distances on this dataspace is unique with…
We study nonlinear dynamics of the kicked particle whose motion is confined by square billiard. The kick source is considered as localized at the center of square with central symmetric spatial distribution. It is found that ensemble…
In this article, we study the behavior of a broad family of real sequences derived from randomized one-pile subtraction games. For any subtraction set $S$, we allow any valid number of chips $s\in S$ to be removed at equal probability at…
Binomial distributions capture the probabilities of `heads' outcomes when a (biased) coin is tossed multiple times. The coin may be identified with a distribution on the two-element set {0,1}, where the 1 outcome corresponds to `head'. One…
Concentration bounds are given for throwing balls into bins independently according to a distribution $p$. The probability of a $k$-loaded bin after $m$ balls is shown to be controlled on both sides by $\rho_{m,k} := m \|p\|_k / k$. This…
We study the dynamics of one-particle and few-particle billiard systems in containers of various shapes. In few-particle systems, the particles collide elastically both against the boundary and against each other. In the one-particle case,…
We obtain quenched hitting distributions to be compound Poissonian for a certain class of random dynamical systems. The theory is general and designed to accommodate non-uniformly expanding behavior and targets that do not overlap much with…