DMTCS Proceedings, 2005 European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications (EuroComb '05)

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Walks reaching a line

Philippe Nadeau

Abstract


We enumerate walks in the plane ℝ2, with steps East and North, that stop as soon as they reach a given line; these walks are counted according to the distance of the line to the origin, and we study the asymptotic behavior when the line has a fixed slope and moves away from the origin. When the line has a rational slope, we study a more general class of walks, and give exact as well as asymptotic enumerative results; for this, we define a nice bijection from our walks to words of a rational language. For a general slope, asymptotic results are obtained; in this case, the method employed leads us to find asymptotic results for a wider class of walks in ℝm.

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