Vertex Reinforced Random Walks: the techniques.
This talk is intended for people who attended my first talk on VRRW in February AS WELL AS for those who did not have a chance to come; I will try my best to make it interesting for both. Vetrex-Reinforced Random Walk (VRRW) on a graph (e.g. $Z^2$) is a nearest-neighbor walk that goes to a vertex with a probability proportional to the number of times this vertex has been visited before. Similar models for {\em edges} has been posed/studied by Diaconis, Davis, Durrett, Selke, Toth, Pemantle and others. It has been shown by Pemantle and Volkov that on $Z^1$ VRRW visits only finitely many vertices a.s. (and just 5 with a positive probability). Recently I proved that the similar statements hold for many other graphs (lattices, trees, etc.) In this talk I will outline the results with the stress on HOW they can be obtained and what are the possible approaches for this kind of problems.