Eve, Adam and the Preferential Attachment Tree

Abstract: We consider the problem of finding the initial vertex (Adam) in a Barab\'asi--Albert tree process $(\mathcal{T}(n) : n \geq 1)$ at large times. More precisely, given $ \varepsilon>0$, one wants to output a subset $ \mathcal{P}{ \varepsilon}(n)$ of vertices of $ \mathcal{T}(n)$ so that the initial vertex belongs to $ \mathcal{P} \varepsilon(n)$ with probability at least $1- \varepsilon$ when $n$ is large. It has been shown by Bubeck, Devroye & Lugosi, refined later by Banerjee & Huang, that one needs to output at least $ \varepsilon^{-1 + o(1)}$ and at most $\varepsilon^{-2 + o(1)}$ vertices to succeed. We prove that the exponent in the lower bound is sharp and the key idea is that Adam is either a large degree" vertex or is a neighbor of alarge degree" vertex (Eve).