DMTCS Proceedings, 23rd Intern. Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial, and Asymptotic Methods for the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA'12)

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Mixing times of Markov chains on 3-Orientations of Planar Triangulations

Sarah Miracle, Dana Randall, Amanda Pascoe Streib, Prasad Tetali

Abstract


Given a planar triangulation, a 3-orientation is an orientation of the internal edges so all internal vertices have out-degree three. Each 3-orientation gives rise to a unique edge coloring known as a Schnyder wood that has proven useful for various computing and combinatorics applications. We consider natural Markov chains for sampling uniformly from the set of 3-orientations. First, we study a ``triangle-reversing'' chain on the space of 3-orientations of a fixed triangulation that reverses the orientation of the edges around a triangle in each move. We show that (i) when restricted to planar triangulations of maximum degree six, the Markov chain is rapidly mixing, and (ii) there exists a triangulation with high degree on which this Markov chain mixes slowly. Next, we consider an ``edge-flipping'' chain on the larger state space consisting of 3-orientations of all planar triangulations on a fixed number of vertices. It was also shown previously that this chain connects the state space and we prove that the chain is always rapidly mixing.

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