Random colorings in manifolds (Q6076188)

The authors introduce a general method for constructing random manifolds and sub-manifolds in arbitrary dimensions. In this paper the authors give constructions for random sub-manifolds in a wide variety of ambient manifolds and a large range of dimensions and co-dimensions. The method is based on randomly coloring the vertices of a triangulation of a manifold, and then considering the sub-manifolds that arise as strata of the induced Voronoi tessellation. The method specializes to generate cases such as random knots, random surfaces in the 4-sphere, random surfaces bounded by a given curve in the boundary of a 4-ball, and to many other settings. The case of 3 colors in a triangulated 3-ball gives rise to random knots and links, where the authors shows that the probability of generating an unknot decays exponentially. This is the so called Debruck-Frisch-Wasserman conjecture that holds in many other models of random knotting. In the general case of \(k\) colors in \(d\)-dimensional manifolds, the authors investigate the random sub-manifolds of different co-dimensions, as the number of vertices in the triangulation grows. They compute the expected Euler characteristic, and discuss relations to homological percolation and other topological properties. Finally, they explore a method to search for solutions to topological problems by generating random sub-manifolds. The authors describe computer experiments that search for a low-genus surface in the 4-dimensional ball whose boundary is a given knot in the 3-dimensional sphere.