PIMS Math Colloquium: Urn Respect

PIMS Distinguished Lecturer Mark Holmes from the University of Melbourne will be giving a colloquium talk on "Urn Respect" in ECS 104 on Friday February 14 3:30-4:20PM. 

Abstract:

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 together with an additional 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.