English

A Variant on the Feline Josephus Problem

Combinatorics 2018-04-02 v1

Abstract

In the Feline Josephus problem, soldiers stand in a circle, each having \ell `lives'. Going around the circle, a life is taken from every kkth soldier; soldiers with 0 lives remaining are removed from the circle. Finding the last surviving soldier proves to be an interesting and difficult problem, even in the case when =1\ell=1. In our variant of the Feline Josephus problem, we instead remove a life from kk consecutive soldiers, and skip 1 soldier. In certain cases, we find closed formulas for the surviving soldier and hint at a way of finding such solutions in other cases.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.11340,
  title  = {A Variant on the Feline Josephus Problem},
  author = {Shaun Sullivan and Erik Insko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.11340},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

9 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:09:30.412Z