How hard is it to marry at random? (On the approximation of the permanent)
STOC '86 Proceedings of the eighteenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Approximate counting, uniform generation and rapidly mixing Markov chains
Information and Computation
Polynomial-time approximation algorithms for the Ising model
SIAM Journal on Computing
Exact sampling with coupled Markov chains and applications to statistical mechanics
Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Random structures and algorithms
Sampling spin configurations of an Ising system
Proceedings of the tenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Fast mixing for independent sets, colorings and other models on trees
SODA '04 Proceedings of the fifteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
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Many natural Markov chains undergo a phase transition as a temperature parameter is varied; a chain can be rapidly mixing at high temperature and slowly mixing at low temperature. Moreover, it is believed that even at low temperature, the rate of convergence is strongly dependent on the environment in which the underlying system is placed. It is believed that the boundary conditions of a spin configuration can determine whether a local Markov chain mixes quickly or slowly, but this has only been verified previously for models defined on trees. We demonstrate that the mixing time of Broder's Markov chain for sampling perfect and near-perfect matchings does have such a dependence on the environment when the underlying graph is the square-octagon lattice. We show the same effect occurs for a related chain on the space of Ising and “near-Ising” configurations on the two-dimensional Cartesian lattice.