Paper detail

Predators and altruists arriving on jammed Riviera

The Riviera model is a combinatorial model for a settlement along a coastline, introduced recently by the authors. Of most interest are the so-called jammed states, where no more houses can be built without violating the condition that every house needs to have free space to at least one of its sides. In this paper, we introduce new agents (predators and altruists) that want to build houses once the settlement is already in the jammed state. Their behavior is governed by a different set of rules, and this allows them to build new houses even though the settlement is jammed. Our main focus is to detect jammed configurations that are resistant to predators, to altruists, and to both predators and altruists. We provide bivariate generating functions, and complexity functions (configurational entropies) for such jammed configurations. We also discuss this problem in the two-dimensional setting of a combinatorial settlement planning model that was also recently introduced by the authors, and of which the Riviera model is just a special case.