This paper deals with the partition function of the Ising model from statistical mechanics, which is used to study phase transitions in physical systems. A special case of interest is that of the Ising model with constant energies and external field. One may consider such an Ising system as a simple graph together with vertex and edge weights. When these weights are considered indeterminates, the partition function for the constant case is a trivariate polynomial Z(G;x,y,z). This polynomial was studied with respect to its approximability by Goldberg, Jerrum and Paterson. Z(G;x,y,z) generalizes a bivariate polynomial Z(G;t,y), which was studied in by Andrén and Markström.

We consider the complexity of Z(Gt,y) and Z(G;x,y,z) in comparison to that of the Tutte polynomial, which is well known to be closely related to the Potts model in the absence of an external field. We show that Z(G;x,y,z) is #P-hard to evaluate at all points in 3, except those in an exceptional set of low dimension, even when restricted to simple graphs which are bipartite and planar. A counting version of the Exponential Time Hypothesis, #ETH, was introduced by Dell, Husfeldt and Wahlén in order to study the complexity of the Tutte polynomial. In analogy to their results, we give under #ETH a dichotomy theorem stating that evaluations of Z(G;t,y) either take exponential time in the number of vertices of G to compute, or can be done in polynomial time. Finally, we give an algorithm for computing Z(G;x,y,z) in polynomial time on graphs of bounded clique-width, which is not known in the case of the Tutte polynomial.

We consider random permutations derived by sampling from stick-breaking partitions of the unit interval. The cycle structure of such a permutation can be associated with the path of a decreasing Markov chain on n integers. Under certain assumptions on the stick-breaking factor we prove a central limit theorem for the logarithm of the order of the permutation, thus extending the classical Erdős–Turán law for the uniform permutations and its generalization for Ewens' permutations associated with sampling from the PD/GEM(θ)-distribution. Our approach is based on using perturbed random walks to obtain the limit laws for the sum of logarithms of the cycle lengths.

We study distance properties of a general class of random directed acyclic graphs (dags). In a dag, many natural notions of distance are possible, for there exist multiple paths between pairs of nodes. The distance of interest for circuits is the maximum length of a path between two nodes. We give laws of large numbers for the typical depth (distance to the root) and the minimum depth in a random dag. This completes the study of natural distances in random dags initiated (in the uniform case) by Devroye and Janson. We also obtain large deviation bounds for the minimum of a branching random walk with constant branching, which can be seen as a simplified version of our main result.

Probabilistic operational semantics for a nondeterministic extension of pure λ-calculus is studied. In this semantics, a term evaluates to a (finite or infinite) distribution of values. Small-step and big-step semantics, inductively and coinductively defined, are given. Moreover, small-step and big-step semantics are shown to produce identical outcomes, both in call-by-value and in call-by-name. Plotkin’s CPS translation is extended to accommodate the choice operator and shown correct with respect to the operational semantics. Finally, the expressive power of the obtained system is studied: the calculus is shown to be sound and complete with respect to computable probability distributions.

The infinite Post Correspondence Problem (ωPCP) was shown to be undecidable by Ruohonen (1985) in general. Blondel and Canterini [Theory Comput. Syst. 36 (2003) 231–245] showed that ωPCP is undecidable for domain alphabets of size 105, Halava and Harju [RAIRO–Theor. Inf. Appl. 40 (2006) 551–557] showed that ωPCP is undecidable for domain alphabets of size 9. By designing a special coding, we delete a letter from Halava and Harju’s construction. So we prove that ωPCP is undecidable for domain alphabets of size 8.

We initiate the theory and applications of biautomata. A biautomaton can read a word alternately from the left and from the right. We assign to each regular language L its canonical biautomaton. This structure plays, among all biautomata recognizing the language L, the same role as the minimal deterministic automaton has among all deterministic automata recognizing the language L. We expect that from the graph structure of this automaton one could decide the membership of a given language for certain significant classes of languages. We present the first two results of this kind: namely, a language L is piecewise testable if and only if the canonical biautomaton of L is acyclic. From this result Simon’s famous characterization of piecewise testable languages easily follows. The second class of languages characterizable by the graph structure of their biautomata are prefix-suffix testable languages.