Stationary position of a transposed distinguished book Created 2026-10-31 Updated 2026-11-05
Place books in a row and distinguish one of them. At each step select the distinguished book with Probability and each of the other books with Probability . Swap the selected book with its left neighbour; selecting the leftmost book leaves the ordering unchanged.
The distinguished book's position is a birth-death chain. From an interior position it moves left with Probability , moves right with Probability when the book immediately to its right is selected, and otherwise holds. Missing outward moves at the endpoints become holding. Detailed balance therefore gives for . With ,
This finite Truncated geometric distribution is valid even when : both numerator and denominator then have the same negative sign. The uniform case is , when every book is selected equally often. Large selection Probability for the distinguished book biases it toward the left end. The strict range of ensures positive motion in both directions and avoids division by zero in the ratio.