Thursday, 13 December 2012

linear algebra - Number of invertible {0,1} real matrices?

As Michael noted, the conjectured bound for the probability a random $(0,1)$ matrix is singular is conjectured to be $(1+o(1)) n^2 2^{-n} $. This corresponds to the natural lower bound coming from the observation that if a matrix has two equal rows or columns it is automatically singular.



The best bound currently known for this problem is $(frac{1}{sqrt{2}} + o(1) )^n$, and is due to Bourgain, Vu, and Wood. Corollary 3.3 in their paper also gives a bound of $(frac{1}{sqrt{q}}+o(1))^n$ in the case where entries are uniformly chosen from ${0, 1, dots, q-1}$ (here the conjectured bound would be around $n^2 q^{-n})$



Even showing that the determinant is almost surely non-zero is not easy (this was first proven by Komlos in 1967, and the reference is given in Michael's Sloane link).

No comments:

Post a Comment