Related papers: Cutoff for the Biased Random Transposition Shuffle

A generalized `$15$ puzzle' consists of an $n \times n$ numbered grid, with one missing number. A move in the game switches the position of the empty square with the position of one of its neighbors. We solve Diaconis' `15 puzzle problem'…

We prove a cutoff for the random walk on random $n$-lifts of finite weighted graphs, even when the random walk on the base graph $\mathcal{G}$ of the lift is not reversible. The mixing time is w.h.p. $t_{mix}=h^{-1}\log n$, where $h$ is a…

We analyze a Markov chain, known as the product replacement chain, on the set of generating $n$-tuples of a fixed finite group $G$. We show that as $n \rightarrow \infty$, the total-variation mixing time of the chain has a cutoff at time…

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 total-variation cutoff phenomenon has been conjectured to hold for simple random walk on all transitive expanders. However, very little is actually known regarding this conjecture, and cutoff on sparse graphs in general. In this paper…

In the top to random shuffle, the first a cards are removed from a deck of n cards 12 \cdots n and then inserted back into the deck. This action can be studied by treating the top to random shuffle as an element B_a, which we define…

In card-based cryptography, a deck of physical cards is used to achieve secure computation. A shuffle, which randomly permutes a card-sequence along with some probability distribution, ensures the security of a card-based protocol. The…

We use the correlation matrix of the generating distribution to determine the mixing time for random walks on the torus $(\mathbb{Z}/q\mathbb{Z})^n$. We present our method in the context of the Diaconis-Gangolli random walk on both the $1…

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…

The cutoff phenomenon for an ergodic Markov chain describes a sharp transition in the convergence to its stationary distribution, over a negligible period of time, known as cutoff window. We study the cutoff phenomenon for simple random…

We prove a conjecture raised by the work of Diaconis and Shahshahani (1981) about the mixing time of random walks on the permutation group induced by a given conjugacy class. To do this we exploit a connection with coalescence and…

We prove a general theorem on cutoffs for symmetric simple exclusion processes on graphs with open boundaries, under the natural assumption that the graphs converge geometrically and spectrally to a compact metric measure space with…

We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…

In this paper, we propose a new Markov chain which generalizes random-to-random shuffling on permutations to random-to-random shuffling on linear extensions of a finite poset of size $n$. We conjecture that the second largest eigenvalue of…

We consider an analogue of the Kac random walk on the special orthogonal group $SO(N)$, in which at each step a random rotation is performed in a randomly chosen 2-plane of $\bR^N$. We obtain sharp asymptotics for the rate of convergence in…

We consider the random walk on the hypercube which moves by picking an ordered pair $(i,j)$ of distinct coordinates uniformly at random and adding the bit at location $i$ to the bit at location $j$, modulo $2$. We show that this Markov…

We develop a general theory for Markov chains whose transition probabilities are the coefficients of descent operators on combinatorial Hopf algebras. These model the breaking-then-recombining of combinational objects. Examples include the…

Let $U$ be a Haar distributed matrix in $\mathbb U(n)$ or $\mathbb O (n)$. In a previous paper, we proved that after centering, the two-parameter process \[T^{(n)} (s,t) = \sum_{i \leq \lfloor ns \rfloor, j \leq \lfloor nt\rfloor}…

We consider $N\times N$ self-adjoint Gaussian random matrices defined by an arbitrary deterministic sparsity pattern with $d$ nonzero entries per row. We show that such random matrices exhibit a canonical localization-delocalization…

Low-dimensional dynamical systems are fruitful models for mixing in fluid and granular flows. We study a one-dimensional discontinuous dynamical system (termed "cutting and shuffling" of a line segment), and we present a comprehensive…