## Archive for May 30th, 2017

### Intransitive dice V: we want a local central limit theorem

May 30, 2017

It has become clear that what we need in order to finish off one of the problems about intransitive dice is a suitable version of the local central limit theorem. Roughly speaking, we need a version that is two-dimensional — that is, concerning a random walk on $\mathbb Z^2$ — and completely explicit — that is, giving precise bounds for error terms so that we can be sure that they get small fast enough.

There is a recent paper that does this in the one-dimensional case, though it used an elementary argument, whereas I would prefer to use Fourier analysis. Here I’d like to begin the process of proving a two-dimensional result that is designed with our particular application in mind. If we are successful in doing that, then it would be natural to try to extract from the proof a more general statement, but that is not a priority just yet.

As people often do, I’ll begin with a heuristic argument, and then I’ll discuss how we might try to sharpen it up to the point where it gives us good bounds for the probabilities of individual points of $\mathbb Z^2$. Much of this post is cut and pasted from comments on the previous post, since it should be more convenient to have it in one place.
(more…)