English

Slowdown for the geodesic-biased random walk

Probability 2019-09-13 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

Given a connected graph GG with some subset of its vertices excited and a fixed target vertex, in the geodesic-biased random walk on GG, a random walker moves as follows: from an unexcited vertex, she moves to a uniformly random neighbour, whereas from an excited vertex, she takes one step along some fixed shortest path towards the target vertex. We show, perhaps counterintuitively, that the geodesic-bias can slow the random walker down exponentially: there exist connected, bounded-degree nn-vertex graphs with excitations where the expected hitting time of a fixed target is at least exp(n4/100)\exp (\sqrt[4]{n} / 100).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.05616,
  title  = {Slowdown for the geodesic-biased random walk},
  author = {Mikhail Beliayeu and Petr Chmel and Bhargav Narayanan and Jan Petr},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.05616},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

11 pages, submitted

R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:13:23.867Z