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In this paper, we study random minimax trees of the incremental type.
These are complete b-ary
trees with n levels of edges, in which we associate independent identically
distributed random variables with the edges. The value of a leaf is the
sum of the edge values on the path to the root.
The value of each internal node is obtained at alternating levels by taking
the minimum or maximum value of the values of the children. We are interested
in the behavior of the value of the root, V_n.
For bounded generic edge random variable X, we show that V_n
/ n tends to a limit almost surely as n \to \infty. The limit is a highly
nonlinear function of the distribution of X. For the
case of a Bernoulli random variable withparameter p, the limit is a continuous
function that is zero
for p near zero, one for p near one, 1/2 for p in an interval around
1/2, and nonlinear inbetween. A comparison is made with a random minimax
tree model studied by Pearl, in which the leaf values are independent.
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