An improved energy argument for the Hegselmann-Krause model

We show that the freezing time of the $d$-dimensional Hegselmann-Krause model is $O(n^4)$ where $n$ is the number of agents. This improves the best known upper bound whenever $d\geq 2$

Permutations destroying arithmetic progressions in finite cyclic groups

A permutation \pi of an abelian group G is said to destroy arithmetic progressions (APs) if, whenever (a,b,c) is a non-trivial 3-term AP in G, that is c-b=b-a and a,b,c are not all equal, then (\pi(a),\pi(b),\pi(c)) is not an AP. In a paper from 2004, the first author conjectured that such a permutation exists of Z/nZ, for all n except 2,3,5 and 7. Here we prove, as a special case of a more general result, that such a permutation exists for all n >= n_0, for some explcitly constructed number n_0 \approx 1.4 x 10^{14}. We also construct such a permutation of Z/pZ for all primes p > 3 such that p = 3 (mod 8).Comment: 11 pages, no figure

First-passage percolation on Cartesian power graphs

We consider first-passage percolation on the class of "high-dimensional" graphs that can be written as an iterated Cartesian product $G\square G \square \dots \square G$ of some base graph $G$ as the number of factors tends to infinity. We propose a natural asymptotic lower bound on the first-passage time between $(v, v, \dots, v)$ and $(w, w, \dots, w)$ as $n$, the number of factors, tends to infinity, which we call the critical time $t^*_G(v, w)$. Our main result characterizes when this lower bound is sharp as $n\rightarrow\infty$. As a corollary, we are able to determine the limit of the so-called diagonal time-constant in $\mathbb{Z}^n$ as $n\rightarrow\infty$ for a large class of distributions of passage times.Comment: 30 pages, 1 figur