No label defined (Q4940036)

Consider players \(P_1, P_2, \dots, P_n\) tossing coin, with each player going out after tossing a head. Remaining players continue to toss until all go out. In GAME1 everything proceeds cyclically, while in GAME2 players stand in a row and the game always resumes at the beginning of the row after a player goes out. The problem is to determine \(\text{Prob}(\sigma)\) that the players will go out in the order \(\sigma (1), \sigma (2), \dots, \sigma (n)\). GAME1 was introduced by \textit{R.~H.~Moritz} and \textit{R.~C.~Williams} [Math. Mag. 61, No. 1, 24-29 (1988; Zbl 0639.90109)] who showed that \(\text{Prob}(\sigma)\) depends on \(L(\sigma)\), which denotes the least number of tails needed to realize the permutation \(\sigma \). The same dependence is found to hold for GAME2 with respect to \(l(\sigma)\), where \(l(\sigma)\) denotes the length function of the Coxeter group of type \(A_{n-1}\) (i.e.~the symmetric group). The function \(L(\sigma)\) is expressed in terms of size of \(\text{Des}(\sigma) =\{i;\) \(\sigma (i) > \sigma (i+1)\}\) and of the major index \(\text{maj}(\sigma) = \sum i\), \(i \in \text{Des}(\sigma)\). Comparing both games one gets a bijection \(\rho \) with \(\text{maj}(\sigma)=l(\rho (\sigma))\). The bijection is different from a similar bijection defined in [\textit{D. Foata}, Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 19, 236-240 (1968; Zbl 0157.03403)]. Finally, a modification of the above two games is considered and connected to Coxeter group of type \(B_n\). (In Theorem 3 replace reference to page 4 by reference to page 279).