Counting Path Configurations in Parallel Diffusion

Authors Todd Mullen, R. J. Nowakowski, D. Cox

Publication date 9 October 2020

Abstract: Parallel Diffusion is a variant of Chip-Firing introduced in 2018 by Duffy et al. In Parallel Diffusion, chips move from places of high concentration to places of low concentration through a discrete-time process. At each time step, every vertex sends a chip to each of its poorer neighbours, allowing for some vertices to perhaps fall into debt (represented by negative stack sizes). In their recent paper, Long and Narayanan proved a conjecture from the original paper by Duffy et al. that every Parallel Diffusion process eventually, after some pre-period, exhibits periodic behaviour. With this result, we are now able to count the number of these periods that exist up to a definition of isomorphism. We determine a recurrence relation for calculating this number for a path of any length. If

T_{n}

is the number of configurations with period length 2 that can exist on

P_{n}

up to isomorphism and

n

is an integer greater than 4, we conclude that

T_{n} = 3 T_{n - 1} + 2 T_{n - 2} + T_{n - 3} - T_{n - 4}

.

This page was built for publication: Counting Path Configurations in Parallel Diffusion

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q6350925)