I will speak about various methods for generating examples of random combinatorial structures of a large size n. Methods for doing this include encoding the structures as words over some alphabet and considering the combinatorics of words, "unrolling" of recurrences, and the Boltzmann sampling method of Flajolet and coworkers. From examining these methods closely we can also obtain statistical results on various parameters of these random structures.
Graduate Student Combinatorics Seminar
Wednesday, November 19, 2008 - 12:30pm
Michael Lugo
University of Pennsylvania