Recently Avis and Jordan have demonstrated the efficiency of a simple technique called budgeting for the parallelization of a number of tree search algorithms. The idea is to limit the amount of work that a processor performs before it terminates its search and returns any unexplored nodes to a master process. This limit is set by a critical budget parameter which determines the overhead of the process. In this paper we study the behaviour of the budget parameter on conditional Galton-Watson trees obtaining asymptotically tight bounds on this overhead. We present empirical results to show that this bound is surprisingly accurate in practice.
A recursive function on a tree is a function in which each leaf has a given value, and each internal node has a value equal to a function of the number of children, the values of the children, and possibly an explicitly specified random element $U$. The value of the root is the key quantity of interest in general. In this first study, all node values and function values are in a finite set $S$. In this note, we describe the limit behavior when the leaf values are drawn independently from a fixed distribution on $S$, and the tree $T_n$ is a random Galton--Watson tree of size $n$.
At each site of a supercritical Galton-Watson tree place a parking spot which can accommodate one car. Initially, an independent and identically distributed number of cars arrive at each vertex. Cars proceed towards the root in discrete time and park in the first available spot they come to. Let $X$ be the total number of cars that arrive to the root. Goldschmidt and Przykucki proved that $X$ undergoes a phase transition from being finite to infinite almost surely as the mean number of cars arriving to each vertex increases. We show that $EX$ is finite at the critical threshold, describe its growth rate above criticality, and prove that it increases as the initial car arrival distribution becomes less concentrated. For the canonical case that either 0 or 2 cars arrive at each vertex of a $d$-ary tree, we give improved bounds on the critical threshold and show that $P(X = 0)$ is discontinuous.
We study the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) on trees where particles are generated at the root. Particles can only jump away from the root, and they jump from $x$ to $y$ at rate $r_{x,y}$ provided $y$ is empty. Starting from the all empty initial condition, we show that the distribution of the configuration at time $t$ converges to an equilibrium. We study the current and give conditions on the transition rates such that the current is of linear order or such that there is zero current, i.e. the particles block each other. A key step, which is of independent interest, is to bound the first generation at which the particle trajectories of the first $n$ particles decouple.
Distinguishing between continuous and first-order phase transitions is a major challenge in random discrete systems. We study the topic for events with recursive structure on Galton-Watson trees. For example, let $mathcal{T}_1$ be the event that a Galton-Watson tree is infinite, and let $mathcal{T}_2$ be the event that it contains an infinite binary tree starting from its root. These events satisfy similar recursive properties: $mathcal{T}_1$ holds if and only if $mathcal{T}_1$ holds for at least one of the trees initiated by children of the root, and $mathcal{T}_2$ holds if and only if $mathcal{T}_2$ holds for at least two of these trees. The probability of $mathcal{T}_1$ has a continuous phase transition, increasing from 0 when the mean of the child distribution increases above 1. On the other hand, the probability of $mathcal{T}_2$ has a first-order phase transition, jumping discontinuously to a nonzero value at criticality. Given the recursive property satisfied by the event, we describe the critical child distributions where a continuous phase transition takes place. In many cases, we also characterize the event undergoing the phase transition.
When normal and mis`{e}re games are played on bi-type binary Galton-Watson trees (with vertices coloured blue or red and each having either no child or precisely $2$ children), with one player allowed to move along monochromatic edges and the other along non-monochromatic edges, the draw probabilities equal $0$ unless every vertex gives birth to one blue and one red child. On bi-type Poisson trees where each vertex gives birth to Poisson$(lambda)$ offspring in total, the draw probabilities approach $1$ as $lambda rightarrow infty$. We study such emph{nove