EN FR
EN FR


Section: New Results

Enumeration of 3-dimensional lattice walks confined to the positive octant

Small step walks in 2D are by now quite well understood, but almost everything remains to be done in higher dimensions. Alin Bostan, together with Mireille Bousquet-Mélou (CNRS and Univ. Bordeaux), Manuel Kauers (Johannes Kepler Univ.) and Stephen Melczer (Univ. of Waterloo and ENS Lyon), have explored in [1] the classification problem for 3-dimensional walks with unit steps confined to the positive octant. The first difficulty is their number: there are 11 074 225 cases (instead of 79 in dimension 2). In our work, we focused on the 35 548 that have at most six steps. We applied to them a combined approach, first experimental and then rigorous. Among the 35 548 cases, we first found 170 cases with a finite group; in the remaining cases, our experiments suggest that the group is infinite. We then rigorously proved D-finiteness of the generating series in all the 170 cases, with the exception of 19 intriguing step sets for which the nature of the generating function still remains unclear. In two challenging cases, no human proof is currently known, and we derived computer-algebra proofs, thus constituting the first proofs for those two step sets.