The importance of being Urnest

Speaker: 

Mark Holmes

Speaker Affiliation: 

University of Melbourne

August 30, 2019

MATH 202

Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2

Canada

Starting with one red ball and one black ball in an urn, repeat the following  - choose a ball from the urn at random, observe the colour, put it back in the urn and ADD another ball of the same colour.  This simple model is called Polya’s urn and is an example of a random process with ``reinforcement’’ (e.g. if red is selected first then after this first iteration we have 2 red balls and 1 black ball in the urn, so red is more likely to be selected again in the second iteration).  Beginning with Polya’s urn, this talk will take a tour through some of the weird and wonderful behaviour that has been observed or conjectured for various random processes with reinforcement.

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Event Topic: 

Probability