Cover times of many random walkers on a discrete network

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kim, Hyunjoong, Lawley, Sean D
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Kim, Hyunjoong
Lawley, Sean D
author_facet Kim, Hyunjoong
Lawley, Sean D
contents The speed of an exhaustive search can be measured by a cover time, which is defined as the time it takes a random searcher to visit every state in some target set. Cover times have been studied in both the physics and probability literatures, with most prior works focusing on a single searcher. In this paper, we prove an explicit formula for all the moments of the cover time for many searchers on an arbitrary discrete network. Our results show that such cover times depend only on properties of the network along the shortest paths to the most distant parts of the target. This mere local dependence contrasts with the well-known result that cover times for single searchers depend on global properties of the network. We illustrate our rigorous results by stochastic simulations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_07905
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cover times of many random walkers on a discrete network
Kim, Hyunjoong
Lawley, Sean D
Statistical Mechanics
Probability
60J27, 60G70, 60G07
The speed of an exhaustive search can be measured by a cover time, which is defined as the time it takes a random searcher to visit every state in some target set. Cover times have been studied in both the physics and probability literatures, with most prior works focusing on a single searcher. In this paper, we prove an explicit formula for all the moments of the cover time for many searchers on an arbitrary discrete network. Our results show that such cover times depend only on properties of the network along the shortest paths to the most distant parts of the target. This mere local dependence contrasts with the well-known result that cover times for single searchers depend on global properties of the network. We illustrate our rigorous results by stochastic simulations.
title Cover times of many random walkers on a discrete network
topic Statistical Mechanics
Probability
60J27, 60G70, 60G07
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07905