Random Walks on Dihedral Groups

In this paper, we look at the lower bounds of two specific random walks on the dihedral group. The first theorem discusses a random walk generated with equal probabilities by one rotation and one flip. We show that roughly p ² steps are necessary for the walk to become close to uniformly distributed on all of D _2p where p≥3 is an integer. Next we take a random walk on the dihedral group generated by a random k-subset of the dihedral group. The latter theorem shows that it is necessary to take roughly p ^2/(k−1) steps in the typical random walk to become close to uniformly distributed on all of D _2p . We note that there is at least one rotation and one flip in the k-subset, or the random walk generated by this subset has periodicity problems or will not generate all of D _2p .