INTERDISCIPLINARY STOCHASTIC PROCESSES COLLOQUIUM Tuesday September 21, room 60 Evans, 4.10 - 5.00pm Speaker: James Propp, University of Wisconsin - Madison Title: Better than random: Quasirandomness for discrete stochastic systems Abstract: Many problems in discrete probability theory and its applications involve probabilities of events, or expected values of random variables, that are hard to determine analytically but can be estimated empirically using some sort of Monte Carlo simulation. In some cases, one can also get good estimates by using well-chosen deterministic simulations. When they exist, such quasirandom simulation schemes often are just as fast as random simulation, give smaller error, and give deterministic error-bounds rather than confidence-intervals. For a preview of the talk, see http://murl.microsoft.com/LectureDetails.asp?1050 or http://www.math.wisc.edu/~propp/rotor-router-1.0 This talk is based on joint work with Ander Holroyd and Lionel Levine.