Related papers: Mixing time of the torus shuffle
We consider a problem of shuffling a deck of cards with ordered labels. Namely we split the deck of N=k^tq cards (where t>=1 is maximal) into k equally sized stacks and then take the top card off of each stack and sort them by the order of…
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…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. A ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards, where one after…
We study Markov chains for $\alpha$-orientations of plane graphs, these are orientations where the outdegree of each vertex is prescribed by the value of a given function $\alpha$. The set of $\alpha$-orientations of a plane graph has a…
Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…
We prove that Broder's Markov chain for approximate sampling near-perfect and perfect matchings is not rapidly mixing for Hamiltonian, regular, threshold and planar bipartite graphs, filling a gap in the literature. In the second part we…
The problem of sampling from the stationary distribution of a Markov chain finds widespread applications in a variety of fields. The time required for a Markov chain to converge to its stationary distribution is known as the classical…
We reconsider a recently published algorithm (Dalkilic et al.) for merging lists by way of the perfect shuffle. The original publication gave only experimental results which, although consistent with linear execution time on the samples…
We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent "lifting eigenvectors" technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound,…
This paper studies the game of guessing riffle-shuffled cards with complete feedback. A deck of $n$ cards labelled 1 to $n$ is riffle-shuffled once and placed on a table. A player tries to guess the cards from top and is given complete…
In [Combinatorics, Probability and Computing 16 (2007), 557 - 593, Theorem 1] we proved a polynomial-time bound on the mixing rate of the switch chain for sampling d-regular graphs. This corrigendum corrects a technical error in the proof.…
A finite ergodic Markov chain is said to exhibit cutoff if its distance to stationarity remains close to 1 over a certain number of iterations and then abruptly drops to near 0 on a much shorter time scale. Discovered in the context of card…
We survey recent results concerning the total-variation mixing time of the simple exclusion process on the segment (symmetric and asymmetric) and a continuum analog, the simple random walk on the simplex with an emphasis on cutoff results.…
Ge and Stefankovic have recently introduced a novel two-variable graph polynomial. When specialised to a bipartite graphs G and evaluated at the point (1/2,1) this polynomial gives the number of independent sets in the graph. Inspired by…
Consider a permutation $\sigma\in S_n$ as a deck of cards numbered from 1 to $n$ and laid out in a row, where $\sigma_j$ denotes the number of the card that is in the $j$-th position from the left.\rm\ We study some probabilistic and…
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 investigate the mixing properties of a finite Markov chain in random environment defined as a mixture of a deterministic chain and a chain whose state space has been permuted uniformly at random. This work is the counterpart of a…
The cutoff phenomenon describes a sharp transition in the convergence of a family of ergodic finite Markov chains to equilibrium. Many natural families of chains are believed to exhibit cutoff, and yet establishing this fact is often…
Let $X$ be a finite set and let $G$ be a finite group acting on $X$. The group action splits $X$ into disjoint orbits. The Burnside process is a Markov chain on $X$ which has a uniform stationary distribution when the chain is lumped to…
We prove sharp rates of convergence to the Ewens equilibrium distribution for a family of Metropolis algorithms based on the random transposition shuffle on the symmetric group, with starting point at the identity. The proofs rely heavily…