The stochastic voter model

Speaker Name: Ryan Gantner (rgantner at sjfc dot edu )

Speaker Afiliation: St. John Fisher College

Abstract: Envision an environment in which there are two candidates for an election and each voter decides on a candidate simply by asking a neighbor at random times for his/her opinion and then conforming.

Under what situations will this process lead to consensus among the people, and under what situations will the population be spatially divided between candidates? We'll look at the answers to these questions by graphically constructing the stochastic voter model and its dual process.

Target Audience: There are many properties from a first course in probability which show up in this presentation (most notably the memoryless property of exponential random variables), and prior knowledge will help in the understanding of this talk, though one should be able to follow the arguments at some level without such knowledge.