DIMACS 20th Birthday Celebration, 20 November 2009.ppt

Slide * DIMACS 20th Birthday Celebration, 20 November 2009 The Combinatorial Side of Statistical Physics Peter Winkler, Dartmouth Phase I: The Parties Meet We begin with a checkerboard on which checkers are placed uniformly at random subject to the condition that no two are orthogonally adjacent. Combinatorics--- or Statistical Physics? To see better what’s going on, we color the even occupied squares blue and the odd ones red. Notice the tendency to cluster… Discrete hard-core Actually, that was just one corner of this picture (generated by me and Peter Shor using “coupling from the past.