Related papers: The mixing time of the Thorp shuffle
Type A affine shuffles are compared with riffle shuffles followed by a cut. Although these probability measures on the symmetric group S_n are different, they both satisfy a convolution property. Strong evidence is given that when the…
We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of…
Recently, Diaconis, Ram and I created Markov chains out of the coproduct-then-product operator on combinatorial Hopf algebras. These chains model the breaking and recombining of combinatorial objects. Our motivating example was the…
Tumbleweed is a popular two-player perfect-information new territorial game played at the prestigious Mind Sport Olympiad. We define a generalized version of the game, where the board size is arbitrary and so is the possible number of…
A comply/constrain game or a game with a Muller twist is a game where the next player is allowed to place constraints on opponent's next move. We develop a closed form formula for the Grundy value of the single-pile subtraction game where…
We study a single-flip dynamics for the monotone surface in (2+1) dimensions obtained from a boxed plane partition. The surface is analyzed as a system of non-intersecting simple paths. When the flips have a non-zero bias we prove that…
Two-player complete-information game trees are perhaps the simplest possible setting for studying general-sum games and the computational problem of finding equilibria. These games admit a simple bottom-up algorithm for finding subgame…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…
We consider irreducible Markov chains on a finite state space. We show that the mixing time of any such chain is equivalent to the maximum, over initial states $x$ and moving large sets $(A_s)_s$, of the hitting time of $(A_s)_s$ starting…
We investigate the mixing time of the capacity $k$ simple exclusion process (also called the partial exclusion process) of Schultz and Sandow with $m$ particles on a segment of length $N$. We show that the $k$-SEP exhibits cutoff at time…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
We study a family of maps from $S_n \to S_n$ we call fixed point homing shuffles. These maps generalize a few known problems such as Conway's Topswops, and a card shuffling process studied by Gweneth McKinley. We show that the iterates of…
We investigate multiple variants of the game Cops and Robbers. Playing it on an $n \times n$ toroidal chess graph, the game is varied by defining moves for cops and robbers differently, always mimicking moves of certain chess pieces. In…
We study the cyclic adjacent transposition (CAT) shuffle of $n$ cards, which is a systematic scan version of the random adjacent transposition (AT) card shuffle. In this paper, we prove that the CAT shuffle exhibits cutoff at $\frac{n^3}{2…
The operation of squaring (coproduct followed by product) in a combinatorial Hopf algebra is shown to induce a Markov chain in natural bases. Chains constructed in this way include widely studied methods of card shuffling, a natural…
In simple card games, cards are dealt one at a time and the player guesses each card sequentially. We study problems where feedback (e.g. correct/incorrect) is given after each guess. For decks with repeated values (as in blackjack where…
Let $B_t(n)$ be the number of set partitions of a set of size~$t$ into at most $n$ parts and let $B'_t(n)$ be the number of set partitions of $\{1,\ldots, t\}$ into at most $n$ parts such that no part contains both $1$ and~$t$ or both $i$…
The Hummer Principle was born from the mind of Bob Hummer in 1946, which consists of performing card shuffles with an even number of cards while leaving some properties of the deck intact. In this document, we will present a generalization…
Card shuffling models have provided simple motivating examples for the mathematical theory of mixing times for Markov chains. As a complement, we introduce a more intricate realistic model of a certain observable real-world scheme for…