PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS SEMINAR
 
 

10.00 am, Wednesday March 16th, 2005
M345 (Building 28)

Knuth's parking problem for caravans
 

Prof. Jean Bertoin
UniversitŽ Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France



We consider a generalized version of Knuth's parking problem, in which caravans consisting of a random number of cars arrive at random on the unit circle. Then each car turns clockwise until it finds a free space to park. Extending a recent work by Chassaing and Louchard (2002), we relate the asymptotics for the sizes of blocks formed by occupied spots with the dynamics of the additive coalescent. According to the behavior of the caravan's size tail distribution, several qualitatively different versions of eternal additive coalescent are involved.
 

Convenor:Kais Hamza