Greene–Nijenhuis–Wilf hook walk

At a noncorner cell of a Young diagram, this random walk chooses uniformly one of the other cells in its hook of a Young diagram. It stops at a corner. Every step moves right or down, so it terminates. Its corner probabilities provide a probabilistic proof of the hook-length formula.

For a target corner $(\alpha ,\beta )$ in the Greene–Nijenhuis–Wilf hook walk, put $A_i=h(i,\beta )-1$ and $B_j=h(\alpha ,j)-1$. The probability of terminating there from $(a,b)$ factors as $F_a{G}_b$, where $F_{\alpha }=G_{\beta }=1$, $F_a=A_a^{-1}{\prod }_{i=a+1}^{\alpha -1}(1+A_i^{-1})$ for $a<\alpha$, and $G_b=B_b^{-1}{\prod }_{j=b+1}^{\beta -1}(1+B_j^{-1})$ for $b<\beta$. It is zero when the start is outside the target's northwest rectangle. The factorization uses $h(i,j)-1=A_i+B_j$ and the first-step recurrence.