An interesting spectral gap problem, from Jim Fill

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Fill, James Allen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Fill, James Allen
author_facet Fill, James Allen
contents At the request of Laszlo Babai, founder and an editor of the free online journal Theory of Computing (ToC), theoryofcomputing.org, in August, 2025, I am posting on the arXiv, essentially unedited and not updated, a combination of two closely related sets of unpublished notes from 2003. ToC is keen on publishing links to all bibliography items, and a paper soon to be published there makes progress on a conjecture in my 2003 notes. The sections "The problem", "Evidence in favor of the conjecture", "Facts about the spectral structure of the matrix $K$", and "Stronger conjectures" previously formed a document entitled "An interesting spectral gap problem, from Jim Fill". The sections "Introduction: Self-organizing lists" and "The move-ahead-$1$ (MA1) rule" formed a document entitled "Background on the gap problem". The two sets of notes have inspired some research, including (as one example, with no attempt here at a literature survey) a 2022 paper by Bhakta, Miracle, Randall, and Streib cited in this arXiv document.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An interesting spectral gap problem, from Jim Fill
Fill, James Allen
Probability
Combinatorics
60J10
At the request of Laszlo Babai, founder and an editor of the free online journal Theory of Computing (ToC), theoryofcomputing.org, in August, 2025, I am posting on the arXiv, essentially unedited and not updated, a combination of two closely related sets of unpublished notes from 2003. ToC is keen on publishing links to all bibliography items, and a paper soon to be published there makes progress on a conjecture in my 2003 notes. The sections "The problem", "Evidence in favor of the conjecture", "Facts about the spectral structure of the matrix $K$", and "Stronger conjectures" previously formed a document entitled "An interesting spectral gap problem, from Jim Fill". The sections "Introduction: Self-organizing lists" and "The move-ahead-$1$ (MA1) rule" formed a document entitled "Background on the gap problem". The two sets of notes have inspired some research, including (as one example, with no attempt here at a literature survey) a 2022 paper by Bhakta, Miracle, Randall, and Streib cited in this arXiv document.
title An interesting spectral gap problem, from Jim Fill
topic Probability
Combinatorics
60J10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12557