Limit shapes of stable configurations of a generalized Bulgarian solitaire

arXiv1703.07099MaRDI QIDQ6284607FDOQ6284607

Kimmo Eriksson, Jonas Sjöstrand, Markus Jonsson

Publication date: 21 March 2017

Abstract: Bulgarian solitaire is played on $n$ cards divided into several piles; a move consists of picking one card from each pile to form a new pile. In a recent generalization, $sigma$-Bulgarian solitaire, the number of cards you pick from a pile is some function $sigma$ of the pile size, such that you pick $sigma(h)leh$ cards from a pile of size $h$. Here we consider a special class of such functions. Let us call $sigma$ well-behaved if $sigma(1)=1$ and if both $sigma(h)$ and $h-sigma(h)$ are non-decreasing functions of $h$. Well-behaved $sigma$-Bulgarian solitaire has a geometric interpretation in terms of layers at certain levels being picked in each move. It also satisfies that if a stable configuration of $n$ cards exists it is unique. Moreover, if piles are sorted in order of decreasing size ($lambd{a}_{1}gelambd{a}_{2}gedots$) then a configuration is convex if and only if it is a stable configuration of some well-behaved $sigma$-Bulgarian solitaire. If sorted configurations are represented by Young diagrams and scaled down to have unit height and unit area, the stable configurations corresponding to an infinite sequence of well-behaved functions ($sigm{a}_1,sigm{a}_2,dots$) may tend to a limit shape $phi$. We show that every convex $phi$ with certain properties can arise as the limit shape of some sequence of well-behaved $sigm{a}_n$. For the special case when $sigm{a}_n(h)=lceil{q}_{n}hceil$ for $0<q_{n}le1$, these limit shapes are triangular (in case $q_n^{2}nightarrow0$), or exponential (in case $q_n^{2}nightarrowinfty$), or interpolating between these shapes (in case $q_n^{2}nightarrowC>0$).

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