Looking for a "scientific" application of a recreational puzzle.

Question

First of all the puzzle.

A barman's got 15 glasses which are initially somehow divided into several stacks. The barman repeats the following process a thousand times. He takes the top glass from each (nonempty) stack and forms a new stack with these glasses. Which set of stacks (in terms of their heights) will he come up with?

It's a nice one, give it some thought =)

Having toyed with this problem and its obvious generalizations for an arbitrary number of glasses I came up with the (totally intuitive) hypothesis that such a process and its long-term behavior might emerge in some more-or-less advanced field of research (algebra/geometry/mathematical physics). Can anybody comment?

Update. One can also notice that in this special case of 15 glasses both the problem's statement and the answer are pleasantly simple. I'd be very interested and even somewhat surprised to hear an accordingly simple proof.

Answer 1

I don't know about scientific applications, but you can solve the puzzle as follows (I hope you consider this solution simple):

Look at the Ferrers diagram of the partition of 15 you have, and consider the sum of the Manhattan distances from each dot to the corner of the diagram. At every step of the barman's process, this sum either stays the same or decreases, and it only stays the same if the number of stacks is at least as large as the size of the largest stack minus 1. In this case, we get the new Ferrers diagram by "rotating" the first column of the Ferrers diagram to make it into the first row, and shifting the rest of the diagram diagonally. For example:

x*****      xxxxx
x***        *****
x**     ->  ***
x           **
x

If we assume the existence of a cycle of partitions, then this sum must be constant along the cycle, so the Ferrers diagrams in the cycle can be produced by simply cyclically shifting each diagonal. If there are two adjacent partially filled diagonals, then since adjacent numbers are relatively prime, eventually in this cycle we will get a Ferrers diagram where a hole in the diagonal closer to the corner is next to a dot in the further diagonal, which is not allowed. For instance, if we continue the previous example, we eventually see the hole in the fifth diagonal line up with the dot in the sixth diagonal:

******     *****     ****     *****     *****     *****     ******     ****
****       *****     ****     ***       ****      ****      ****       *****
***    ->  ***   ->  **** ->  ***   ->  **    ->  ***   ->  ***    ->  ***
*          **        **       ***       **        *         **         **
*                    *        *         **        *                    *
                                                  *

Thus, there is at most one partially filled diagonal in any partition that cycles, and the only partition of $15$ satisfying this condition is $15 = 1+2+3+4+5$. Since the number of partitions of $15$ is less than $1000$, the barman enters this cycle before the end of his process.