Brick Wall Excursions: Combinatorial Interpretation of Random Flight Moments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kirgizov, Sergey, Nurligareev, Khaydar, Wallner, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Kirgizov, Sergey
Nurligareev, Khaydar
Wallner, Michael
author_facet Kirgizov, Sergey
Nurligareev, Khaydar
Wallner, Michael
contents We study the expected distance of short uniform random walks in arbitrary dimensions with unit steps in random directions. It is known that for dimensions $d=2$ and $d=4$, all the moments of an $m$-step walk are integer. While for $d=2$, the $n$th moment can be interpreted as the number of abelian squares of length $2n$ over an alphabet with $m$ letters, for $d=4$ no interpretation was known. The goal of this paper is to provide such an interpretation, both for $d=2$ and $d=4$, in terms of $2n$-step lattice paths in dimension $m-1$. Our construction relies on a bijection between Dyck paths with a prescribed number of peaks and words of a certain type. In addition, this bijection allows us to derive closed formulas for the number of lattice paths provided with certain statistics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16715
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Brick Wall Excursions: Combinatorial Interpretation of Random Flight Moments
Kirgizov, Sergey
Nurligareev, Khaydar
Wallner, Michael
Combinatorics
We study the expected distance of short uniform random walks in arbitrary dimensions with unit steps in random directions. It is known that for dimensions $d=2$ and $d=4$, all the moments of an $m$-step walk are integer. While for $d=2$, the $n$th moment can be interpreted as the number of abelian squares of length $2n$ over an alphabet with $m$ letters, for $d=4$ no interpretation was known. The goal of this paper is to provide such an interpretation, both for $d=2$ and $d=4$, in terms of $2n$-step lattice paths in dimension $m-1$. Our construction relies on a bijection between Dyck paths with a prescribed number of peaks and words of a certain type. In addition, this bijection allows us to derive closed formulas for the number of lattice paths provided with certain statistics.
title Brick Wall Excursions: Combinatorial Interpretation of Random Flight Moments
topic Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16715