A Probabilistic Parking Process and Labeled IDLA

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Harris, Pamela E., Holleben, Thiago, Mori, J. Carlos Martínez, Priestley, Amanda, Sullivan, Keith, Wagenius, Per
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Harris, Pamela E.
Holleben, Thiago
Mori, J. Carlos Martínez
Priestley, Amanda
Sullivan, Keith
Wagenius, Per
author_facet Harris, Pamela E.
Holleben, Thiago
Mori, J. Carlos Martínez
Priestley, Amanda
Sullivan, Keith
Wagenius, Per
contents In 1966, Konheim and Weiss [33] introduced a now classical parking protocol. The deterministic process and its resultant objects, known as parking functions, have since become a favorite object of study in enumerative combinatorics. In our work, we introduce and study a probabilistic variant of the classical parking protocol, which is closely related to Internal Diffusion Limited Aggregation, or IDLA, introduced in 1991 by Diaconis and Fulton [19]. In particular, we compute the stationary distribution of this process when initiated with a particular class of initial preferences, of which weakly increasing parking functions are a subset. Furthermore, we compute the expected time it takes for the protocol to complete assuming all of the cars park, and prove that, in some cases, the parking process is negatively correlated. In addition, we study statistics of uniformly random weakly increasing parking functions such as the distribution of the last entry, the probability that a specific set of cars is lucky, and the expected number of lucky cars.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_11718
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Probabilistic Parking Process and Labeled IDLA
Harris, Pamela E.
Holleben, Thiago
Mori, J. Carlos Martínez
Priestley, Amanda
Sullivan, Keith
Wagenius, Per
Probability
Combinatorics
Primary: 60C05, Secondary: 60K35, 60J05
In 1966, Konheim and Weiss [33] introduced a now classical parking protocol. The deterministic process and its resultant objects, known as parking functions, have since become a favorite object of study in enumerative combinatorics. In our work, we introduce and study a probabilistic variant of the classical parking protocol, which is closely related to Internal Diffusion Limited Aggregation, or IDLA, introduced in 1991 by Diaconis and Fulton [19]. In particular, we compute the stationary distribution of this process when initiated with a particular class of initial preferences, of which weakly increasing parking functions are a subset. Furthermore, we compute the expected time it takes for the protocol to complete assuming all of the cars park, and prove that, in some cases, the parking process is negatively correlated. In addition, we study statistics of uniformly random weakly increasing parking functions such as the distribution of the last entry, the probability that a specific set of cars is lucky, and the expected number of lucky cars.
title A Probabilistic Parking Process and Labeled IDLA
topic Probability
Combinatorics
Primary: 60C05, Secondary: 60K35, 60J05
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11718