English

An Optimal Algorithm for Stopping on the Element Closest to the Center of an Interval

Combinatorics 2019-04-30 v1 Probability

Abstract

Real numbers from the interval [0, 1] are randomly selected with uniform distribution. There are nn of them and they are revealed one by one. However, we do not know their values but only their relative ranks. We want to stop on recently revealed number maximizing the probability that that number is closest to 12\frac{1}{2}. We design an optimal stopping algorithm achieving our goal and prove that its probability of success is asymptotically equivalent to 1n2π\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}\sqrt{\frac{2}{\pi}}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.12600,
  title  = {An Optimal Algorithm for Stopping on the Element Closest to the Center of an Interval},
  author = {Ewa M. Kubicka and Grzegorz Kubicki and Małgorzata Kuchta and Małgorzata Sulkowska},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.12600},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

19 pages, 4 figures