A Random Variant of the Game of Plates and Olives

DOI10.1137/18M1177780;zbMATH Open1425.91082arXiv1803.10278MaRDI QIDQ5232149FDOQ5232149

Sean English, Alan Frieze, Andrzej Dudek

Publication date: 29 August 2019

Published in: SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The game of plates and olives was originally formulated by Nicolaescu and encodes the evolution of the topology of the sublevel sets of Morse functions. We consider a random variant of this game. The process starts with an empty table. There are four different types of moves: (1) add a new plate to the table, (2) combine two plates and their olives onto one plate, removing the second plate from the table, (3) add an olive to a plate, and (4) remove an olive from a plate. We show that with high probability the number of olives is linear as the total number of moves goes to infinity. Furthermore, we prove that the number of olives is concentrated around its expectation.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10278

zbMATH Keywords

Markov chainsrandom processesgames

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Markov chains (discrete-time Markov processes on discrete state spaces) (60J10) Combinatorial games (91A46) Probabilistic games; gambling (91A60)

Cites Work

• A Proof of Catalan's Convolution Formula
• Stochastic processes. Theory for applications.
• The topology of competitively constructed graphs
• Counting Morse functions on the 2-sphere
• The game of plates and olives

Cited In (1)

• The game of plates and olives

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