We show that a coupling of non-colliding simple random walkers on the complete graph on n vertices can include at most n - log n walkers. This improves the only previously known upper bound of n - 2 due to Angel, Holroyd, Martin, Wilson and Winkler (Electron. Commun. Probab.18 (2013)). The proof considers couplings of i.i.d. sequences of Bernoulli random variables satisfying a similar avoidance property, for which there is separate interest.

A perfect H-tiling in a graph G is a collection of vertex-disjoint copies of a graph H in G that together cover all the vertices in G. In this paper we investigate perfect H-tilings in a random graph model introduced by Bohman, Frieze and Martin [6] in which one starts with a dense graph and then adds m random edges to it. Specifically, for any fixed graph H, we determine the number of random edges required to add to an arbitrary graph of linear minimum degree in order to ensure the resulting graph contains a perfect H-tiling with high probability. Our proof utilizes Szemerédi's Regularity Lemma [29] as well as a special case of a result of Komlós [18] concerning almost perfect H-tilings in dense graphs.

This special issue is devoted to the Mathematical Analysis of Algorithms, which aims to predict the performance of fundamental algorithms and data structures in general use in Computer Science. The simplest measure of performance is the expected value of a cost function under natural models of randomness for the data, and finer properties of the cost distribution provide a deeper understanding of the complexity. Research in this area, which is intimately connected to combinatorics and random discrete structures, uses a rich variety of combinatorial, analytic and probabilistic methods.

The hard-core model has attracted much attention across several disciplines, representing lattice gases in statistical physics and independent sets in discrete mathematics and computer science. On finite graphs, we are given a parameter λ, and an independent set I arises with probability proportional to λ|I|. On infinite graphs a Gibbs measure is defined as a suitable limit with the correct conditional probabilities, and we are interested in determining when this limit is unique and when there is phase coexistence, i.e., existence of multiple Gibbs measures.

It has long been conjectured that on ℤ2 this model has a critical value λc ≈ 3.796 with the property that if λ < λc then it exhibits uniqueness of phase, while if λ > λc then there is phase coexistence. Much of the work to date on this problem has focused on the regime of uniqueness, with the state of the art being recent work of Sinclair, Srivastava, Štefankovič and Yin showing that there is a unique Gibbs measure for all λ < 2.538. Here we explore the other direction and prove that there are multiple Gibbs measures for all λ > 5.3506. We also show that with the methods we are using we cannot hope to replace 5.3506 with anything below 4.8771.

Our proof begins along the lines of the standard Peierls argument, but we add two innovations. First, following ideas of Kotecký and Randall, we construct an event that distinguishes two boundary conditions and always has long contours associated with it, obviating the need to accurately enumerate short contours. Second, we obtain improved bounds on the number of contours by relating them to a new class of self-avoiding walks on an oriented version of ℤ2.

We consider the asymptotics of the difference between the empirical measures of the β-Hermite tridiagonal matrix and its minor. We prove that this difference has a deterministic limit and Gaussian fluctuations. Through a correspondence between measures and continual Young diagrams, this deterministic limit is identified with the Vershik–Kerov–Logan–Shepp curve. Moreover, the Gaussian fluctuations are identified with a sectional derivative of the Gaussian free field.

Consider any fixed graph whose edges have been randomly and independently oriented, and write {S ⇝} to indicate that there is an oriented path going from a vertex s ∊ S to vertex i. Narayanan (2016) proved that for any set S and any two vertices i and j, {S ⇝ i} and {S ⇝ j} are positively correlated. His proof relies on the Ahlswede–Daykin inequality, a rather advanced tool of probabilistic combinatorics.

In this short note I give an elementary proof of the following, stronger result: writing V for the vertex set of the graph, for any source set S, the events {S ⇝ i}, i ∊ V, are positively associated, meaning that the expectation of the product of increasing functionals of the family {S ⇝ i} for i ∊ V is greater than the product of their expectations.

We study I(T), the number of inversions in a tree T with its vertices labelled uniformly at random, which is a generalization of inversions in permutations. We first show that the cumulants of I(T) have explicit formulas involving the k-total common ancestors of T (an extension of the total path length). Then we consider Xn, the normalized version of I(Tn), for a sequence of trees Tn. For fixed Tn's, we prove a sufficient condition for Xn to converge in distribution. As an application, we identify the limit of Xn for complete b-ary trees. For Tn being split trees [16], we show that Xn converges to the unique solution of a distributional equation. Finally, when Tn's are conditional Galton–Watson trees, we show that Xn converges to a random variable defined in terms of Brownian excursions. By exploiting the connection between inversions and the total path length, we are able to give results that significantly strengthen and broaden previous work by Panholzer and Seitz [46].

We present an average-case analysis of a variant of dual-pivot quicksort. We show that the algorithmic partitioning strategy used is optimal, that is, it minimizes the expected number of key comparisons. For the analysis, we calculate the expected number of comparisons exactly as well as asymptotically; in particular, we provide exact expressions for the linear, logarithmic and constant terms.

An essential step is the analysis of zeros of lattice paths in a certain probability model. Along the way a combinatorial identity is proved.

For an integer q ⩾ 2 and an even integer d, consider the graph obtained from a large complete q-ary tree by connecting with an edge any two vertices at distance exactly d in the tree. This graph has clique number q + 1, and the purpose of this short note is to prove that its chromatic number is Θ((d log q)/log d). It was not known that the chromatic number of this graph grows with d. As a simple corollary of our result, we give a negative answer to a problem of van den Heuvel and Naserasr, asking whether there is a constant C such that for any odd integer d, any planar graph can be coloured with at most C colours such that any pair of vertices at distance exactly d have distinct colours. Finally, we study interval colouring of trees (where vertices at distance at least d and at most cd, for some real c > 1, must be assigned distinct colours), giving a sharp upper bound in the case of bounded degree trees.

Consider a uniform random rooted labelled tree on n vertices. We imagine that each node of the tree has space for a single car to park. A number m ≤ n of cars arrive one by one, each at a node chosen independently and uniformly at random. If a car arrives at a space which is already occupied, it follows the unique path towards the root until it encounters an empty space, in which case it parks there; if there is no empty space, it leaves the tree. Consider m = ⌊α n⌋ and let An,α denote the event that all ⌊α n⌋ cars find spaces in the tree. Lackner and Panholzer proved (via analytic combinatorics methods) that there is a phase transition in this model. Then if α ≤ 1/2, we have $\mathbb{P}({A_{n,\alpha}}) \to {\sqrt{1-2\alpha}}/{(1-\alpha})$, whereas if α > 1/2 we have $\mathbb{P}({A_{n,\alpha}}) \to 0$. We give a probabilistic explanation for this phenomenon, and an alternative proof via the objective method. Along the way, we consider the following variant of the problem: take the tree to be the family tree of a Galton–Watson branching process with Poisson(1) offspring distribution, and let an independent Poisson(α) number of cars arrive at each vertex. Let X be the number of cars which visit the root of the tree. We show that $\mathbb{E}{[X]}$ undergoes a discontinuous phase transition, which turns out to be a generic phenomenon for arbitrary offspring distributions of mean at least 1 for the tree and arbitrary arrival distributions.

An n × n partial Latin square P is called α-dense if each row and column has at most αn non-empty cells and each symbol occurs at most αn times in P. An n × n array A where each cell contains a subset of {1,…, n} is a (βn, βn, βn)-array if each symbol occurs at most βn times in each row and column and each cell contains a set of size at most βn. Combining the notions of completing partial Latin squares and avoiding arrays, we prove that there are constants α, β > 0 such that, for every positive integer n, if P is an α-dense n × n partial Latin square, A is an n × n (βn, βn, βn)-array, and no cell of P contains a symbol that appears in the corresponding cell of A, then there is a completion of P that avoids A; that is, there is a Latin square L that agrees with P on every non-empty cell of P, and, for each i, j satisfying 1 ≤ i, j ≤ n, the symbol in position (i, j) in L does not appear in the corresponding cell of A.

Let r ⩾ 2 be a fixed constant and let $ {\cal H} $ be an r-uniform, D-regular hypergraph on N vertices. Assume further that D → ∞ as N → ∞ and that degrees of pairs of vertices in $ {\cal H} $ are at most L where L = D/( log N)ω(1). We consider the random greedy algorithm for forming a matching in $ {\cal H} $. We choose a matching at random by iteratively choosing edges uniformly at random to be in the matching and deleting all edges that share at least one vertex with a chosen edge before moving on to the next choice. This process terminates when there are no edges remaining in the graph. We show that with high probability the proportion of vertices of $ {\cal H} $ that are not saturated by the final matching is at most (L/D)(1/(2(r−1)))+o(1). This point is a natural barrier in the analysis of the random greedy hypergraph matching process.

We compute the limit shape for several classes of restricted integer partitions, where the restrictions are placed on the part sizes rather than the multiplicities. Our approach utilizes certain classes of bijections which map limit shapes continuously in the plane. We start with bijections outlined in [43], and extend them to include limit shapes with different scaling functions.

We show that the scenery reconstruction problem on the Boolean hypercube is in general impossible. This is done by using locally biased functions, in which every vertex has a constant fraction of neighbours coloured by 1, and locally stable functions, in which every vertex has a constant fraction of neighbours coloured by its own colour. Our methods are constructive, and also give super-polynomial lower bounds on the number of locally biased and locally stable functions. We further show similar results for ℤn and other graphs, and offer several follow-up questions.

A family of sets is said to be intersecting if any two sets in the family have non-empty intersection. In 1973, Erdős raised the problem of determining the maximum possible size of a union of r different intersecting families of k-element subsets of an n-element set, for each triple of integers (n, k, r). We make progress on this problem, proving that for any fixed integer r ⩾ 2 and for any $$k \le ({1 \over 2} - o(1))n$$, if X is an n-element set, and $${\cal F} = {\cal F}_1 \cup {\cal F}_2 \cup \cdots \cup {\cal F}_r $$, where each $$ {\cal F}_i $$ is an intersecting family of k-element subsets of X, then $$|{\cal F}| \le \left( {\matrix{n \cr k \cr } } \right) - \left( {\matrix{{n - r} \cr k \cr } } \right)$$, with equality only if $${\cal F} = \{ S \subset X:|S| = k,\;S \cap R \ne \emptyset \} $$ for some R ⊂ X with |R| = r. This is best possible up to the size of the o(1) term, and improves a 1987 result of Frankl and Füredi, who obtained the same conclusion under the stronger hypothesis $$k < (3 - \sqrt 5 )n/2$$, in the case r = 2. Our proof utilizes an isoperimetric, influence-based method recently developed by Keller and the authors.

We prove a generalmulti-dimensional central limit theorem for the expected number of vertices of a given degree in the family of planar maps whose vertex degrees are restricted to an arbitrary (finite or infinite) set of positive integers D. Our results rely on a classical bijection with mobiles (objects exhibiting a tree structure), combined with refined analytic tools to deal with the systems of equations on infinite variables that arise. We also discuss possible extensions to maps of higher genus and to weighted maps.

Given complex numbers w1,…,wn, we define the weight w(X) of a set X of 0–1 vectors as the sum of $w_1^{x_1} \cdots w_n^{x_n}$ over all vectors (x1,…,xn) in X. We present an algorithm which, for a set X defined by a system of homogeneous linear equations with at most r variables per equation and at most c equations per variable, computes w(X) within relative error ∊ > 0 in (rc)O(lnn-ln∊) time provided $|w_j| \leq \beta (r \sqrt{c})^{-1}$ for an absolute constant β > 0 and all j = 1,…,n. A similar algorithm is constructed for computing the weight of a linear code over ${\mathbb F}_p$. Applications include counting weighted perfect matchings in hypergraphs, counting weighted graph homomorphisms, computing weight enumerators of linear codes with sparse code generating matrices, and computing the partition functions of the ferromagnetic Potts model at low temperatures and of the hard-core model at high fugacity on biregular bipartite graphs.

We give the first polynomial upper bound on the mixing time of the edge-flip Markov chain for unbiased dyadic tilings, resolving an open problem originally posed by Janson, Randall and Spencer in 2002 [14]. A dyadic tiling of size n is a tiling of the unit square by n non-overlapping dyadic rectangles, each of area 1/n, where a dyadic rectangle is any rectangle that can be written in the form [a2−s, (a + 1)2−s] × [b2−t, (b + 1)2−t] for a, b, s, t ∈ ℤ⩾ 0. The edge-flip Markov chain selects a random edge of the tiling and replaces it with its perpendicular bisector if doing so yields a valid dyadic tiling. Specifically, we show that the relaxation time of the edge-flip Markov chain for dyadic tilings is at most O(n4.09), which implies that the mixing time is at most O(n5.09). We complement this by showing that the relaxation time is at least Ω(n1.38), improving upon the previously best lower bound of Ω(n log n) coming from the diameter of the chain.

An abelian processor is an automaton whose output is independent of the order of its inputs. Bond and Levine have proved that a network of abelian processors performs the same computation regardless of processing order (subject only to a halting condition). We prove that any finite abelian processor can be emulated by a network of certain very simple abelian processors, which we call gates. The most fundamental gate is a toppler, which absorbs input particles until their number exceeds some given threshold, at which point it topples, emitting one particle and returning to its initial state. With the exception of an adder gate, which simply combines two streams of particles, each of our gates has only one input wire, which sends letters (‘particles’) from a unary alphabet. Our results can be reformulated in terms of the functions computed by processors, and one consequence is that any increasing function from ℕk to ℕℓ that is the sum of a linear function and a periodic function can be expressed in terms of (possibly nested) sums of floors of quotients by integers.

Given two k-graphs (k-uniform hypergraphs) F and H, a perfect F-tiling (or F-factor) in H is a set of vertex-disjoint copies of F that together cover the vertex set of H. For all complete k-partite k-graphs K, Mycroft proved a minimum codegree condition that guarantees a K-factor in an n-vertex k-graph, which is tight up to an error term o(n). In this paper we improve the error term in Mycroft’s result to a sublinear term that relates to the Turán number of K when the differences of the sizes of the vertex classes of K are co-prime. Furthermore, we find a construction which shows that our improved codegree condition is asymptotically tight in infinitely many cases, thus disproving a conjecture of Mycroft. Finally, we determine exact minimum codegree conditions for tiling K(k)(1, … , 1, 2) and tiling loose cycles, thus generalizing the results of Czygrinow, DeBiasio and Nagle, and of Czygrinow, respectively.