Related papers: Lucky cars and lucky spots in parking functions
In a parking function, a lucky car is a car that parks in its preferred parking spot and the parking outcome is the permutation encoding the order in which the cars park on the street. We give a characterization for the set of parking…
In a parking function, a car is considered lucky if it is able to park in its preferred spot. Extending work of Harris and Martinez, we enumerate outcomes of parking functions with a fixed set of lucky cars. We then consider a…
Consider $n$ cars $C_1, C_2, \ldots, C_n$ that want to park in a parking lot with parking spaces $1,2,\ldots,n$ that appear in order. Each car $C_i$ has a parking preference $\alpha_i \in \{1,2,\ldots,n\}$. The cars appear in order, if…
Classical parking functions are defined as the parking preferences for $n$ cars driving (from west to east) down a one-way street containing parking spaces labeled from $1$ to $n$ (from west to east). Cars drive down the street toward their…
In parking problems, a given number of cars enter a one-way street sequentially, and try to park according to a specified preferred spot in the street. Various models are possible depending on the chosen rule for collisions, when two cars…
Suppose that $m$ drivers each choose a preferred parking space in a linear car park with $n$ spots. In order, each driver goes to their chosen spot and parks there if possible, and otherwise takes the next available spot if it exists. If…
Parking sequences (a generalization of parking functions) are defined by specifying car lengths and requiring that a car attempts to park in the first available spot after its preference. If it does not fit there, then a collision occurs…
We introduce a generalization of parking functions in which cars are limited in their movement backwards and forwards by two nonnegative integer parameters $k$ and $\ell$, respectively. In this setting, there are $n$ spots on a one-way…
A parking function $(c_1,\ldots,c_n)$ can be viewed as having $n$ cars trying to park on a one-way street with $n$ parking spots, where car $i$ tries to park in spot $c_i$, and otherwise he parks in the leftmost available spot after $c_i$.…
A parking function is a function $\pi:[n]\to [n]$ whose $i$th-smallest output is at most $i,$ corresponding to a parking procedure for $n$ cars on a one-way street. We refine this concept by introducing preference-restricted parking…
Quicksort is a classical divide-and-conquer sorting algorithm. It is a comparison sort that makes an average of $2(n+1)H_n - 4n$ comparisons on an array of size $n$ ordered uniformly at random, where $H_n = \sum_{i=1}^n\frac{1}{i}$ is the…
For a labeled, rooted tree with edges oriented towards the root, we consider the vertices as parking spots and the edge orientation as a one-way street. Each driver, starting with her preferred parking spot, searches for and parks in the…
We investigate simple strategies that embody the decisions that one faces when trying to park near a popular destination. Should one park far from the target (destination), where finding a spot is easy, but then be faced with a long walk,…
Parking functions, classically defined in terms of cars with preferred parking spots on a directed path attempting to park there, arise in many combinatorial situations and have seen various generalizations. In particular, parking functions…
We study lucky cars in subsets of parking functions, called Fubini rankings and unit Fubini rankings. A Fubini ranking is a sequence of nonnegative integers that encodes a valid ranking of competitors, where ties are allowed. A car (or…
We investigate parking in a one-dimensional lot, where cars enter at a rate $\lambda$ and each attempts to park close to a target at the origin. Parked cars also depart at rate 1. An entering driver cannot see beyond the parked cars for…
The notion of parking sequences is a new generalization of parking functions introduced by Ehrenborg and Happ. In the parking process defining the classical parking functions, instead of each car only taking one parking space, we allow the…
Suppose that $m$ drivers each choose a preferred parking space in a linear car park with $n$ spots. In order, each driver goes to their chosen spot and parks there if possible, and otherwise takes the next available spot if it exists. If…
We explore the link between combinatorics and probability generated by the question "What does a random parking function look like?" This gives rise to novel probabilistic interpretations of some elegant, known generating functions. It…
Stirling permutations are parking functions, and we investigate two parking function statistics in the context of these objects: lucky cars and displacement. Among our results, we consider two extreme cases: extremely lucky Stirling…