Balls Bins and Randoom Graphs推荐.pdfVIP

CHAPT E R FIVE Balls, Bins, and Rando01 Graphs In this chapter, we focus on one of the most bas ic of random processes : m balls are thrown randomly into n bins, each ball landing in a bin chosen independently and uni­ formly at random . We use the techniques we have developed previously to analyze this process and develop a new approach based on what is known as the Poisson ap­ proximation . We demonstrate several appl ications of this model, including a more sophisticated analysis of the coupon collectors problem and an analy sis of the B loom filter data structure. After introducing a closely related model of random graphs, we show an efficient algorithm for fi nding a Hamiltonian cycle on a random graph with sufficiently many edges. Even though fi nding a Hamiltonian cycle is NP-hard in gen­ eral , our result shows that , for a randomly chosen graph , the problem is solvable in polynomial time with high probabi l ity. 5 . 1 . Example : The Birthday Paradox Sitting in lecture, you notice that there are 30 people in the room . Is it more likely that some two people in the room share the same birthday or that no two people in the room share the same birthday ? We can model this problem by as suming that the birthday of each person is a random day from a 365- day year, chosen independently and uniformly at random for each per­ son . This is obviously a simpl ification; for example, we assume that a persons birthday is equally likely to be any day of the year, we avoid the issue of leap years, and we ig­ nore the possibility of twins � As a model, however, it has the virtue of being easy to understand and analyze. One way to calculate this probability is to directly count the configurations where two people do not share a birthday. It is easier to think about the configurations where people d