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Games on random boards
Colloquium| Speaker: | James Martin, Oxford University |
| Related Webpage: | https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~martin/ |
| Location: | 1147 MSB |
| Start time: | Thu, Feb 27 2025, 3:10PM |
The talk will explore themes around probability, combinatorial game theory, statistical mechanics, and combinatorial optimisation.
“Combinatorial games” typically don’t involve randomness in their play (chess, rather than backgammon). However, using randomness to choose the *rules* of the game gives rise to many interesting scenarios. I’ll discuss how some simple games played on graphs lead to topics including maximum-size matchings, the “hard-core” model on independent sets, probabilistic cellular automata, and phase transitions for branching processes.
The talk will include joint work with several coauthors including Alexander Holroyd, Irène Marcovici, Johan Wästlund, Maria Deijfen, and Riddhipratim Basu. I'll mention various open problems.