Related papers: Mixing times via super-fast coupling
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…
We investigate the mathematics behind unshuffles, a type of card shuffle closely related to classical perfect shuffles. To perform an unshuffle, deal all the cards alternately into two piles and then stack the one pile on top of the other.…
We consider tilings of $\mathbb{Z}^2$ by two types of squares. We are interested in the rate of convergence to the stationarity of a natural Markov chain defined for square tilings. The rate of convergence can be represented by the mixing…
In this thesis we introduce a new type of card shuffle called the one-sided transposition shuffle. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a…
This paper is about the following question: How many riffle shuffles mix a deck of card for games such as blackjack and bridge? An object that comes up in answering this question is the descent polynomial associated with pairs of decks,…
A joint degree matrix (JDM) specifies the number of connections between nodes of given degrees in a graph, for all degree pairs and uniquely determines the degree sequence of the graph. We consider the space of all balanced realizations of…
The switch chain is a well-known Markov chain for sampling directed graphs with a given degree sequence. While not ergodic in general, we show that it is ergodic for regular degree sequences. We then prove that the switch chain is rapidly…
The edge flipping is a non-reversible Markov chain on a given connected graph, which is defined by Chung and Graham in [CG12]. In the same paper, its eigenvalues and stationary distributions for some classes of graphs are identified. We…
The Thorp shuffle is defined as follows. Cut the deck into two equal piles. Drop the first card from the left pile or the right pile according to the outcome of a fair coin flip; then drop from the other pile. Continue this way until both…
The thesis consider the mixing of few (3-4) card shuffling as well as of large (52 card) deck. The thesis is showing the limit on the shuffling to homogeneity elaborated in short program; the thesis is in italian.
Standard perfect shuffles involve splitting a deck of $2n$ cards into two stacks and interlacing the cards from the stacks. There are two ways that this interlacing can be done, commonly referred to as an in shuffle and an out shuffle,…
The transfer operator corresponding to a uniformly expanding map enjoys good spectral properties. Here it is verified that coupling yields explicit estimates that depend continuously on the expansion and distortion constants of the map. For…
Relying on the optimal guessing strategy recently found for a no-feedback card guessing game with $k$-time riffle shuffles, we derive an exact, closed-form formula for the expected number of correct guesses and higher moments for a $1$-time…
We analyze the general biased adjacent transposition shuffle process, which is a well-studied Markov chain on the symmetric group $S_n$. In each step, an adjacent pair of elements $i$ and $j$ are chosen, and then $i$ is placed ahead of $j$…
The problem of efficiently sampling from a set of (undirected, or directed) graphs with a given degree sequence has many applications. One approach to this problem uses a simple Markov chain, which we call the switch chain, to perform the…
Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…
We develop Markov chain mixing time estimates for a class of Markov chains with restricted transitions. We assume transitions may occur along a cycle of $n$ nodes and on $n^\gamma$ additional edges, where $\gamma < 1$. We find that the…
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…
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…
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…