Related papers: The Three Hat Problem
We study the mechanism design problem in the setting where agents are rewarded using information only. This problem is motivated by the increasing interest in secure multiparty computation techniques. More specifically, we consider the…
Federated learning is a setting where agents, each with access to their own data source, combine models from local data to create a global model. If agents are drawing their data from different distributions, though, federated learning…
Three-player Number On the Forehead communication may be thought of as a three-player Number In the Hand promise model, in which each player is given the inputs that are supposedly on the other two players' heads, and promised that they are…
We consider the unconstrained traveling tournament problem, a sports timetabling problem that minimizes traveling of teams. Since its introduction about 20 years ago, most research was devoted to modeling and reformulation approaches. In…
Many packing, scheduling and covering problems that were previously considered by computer science literature in the context of various transportation and production problems, appear also suitable for describing and modeling various…
Puzzles based on coloured cubes and other coloured geometrical figures have a long history in the recreational mathematical literature. One of the most commercially famous of these puzzles is the Instant Insanity that consists of four…
Chain of thought (CoT) fine-tuning aims to endow large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities by training them on curated reasoning traces. It leverages both supervised and reinforced fine-tuning to cultivate human-like…
In 2008, Schmidt and Tuller stated a conjecture concerning optimal packing and covering of integers by translates of a given three-point set. In this note, we confirm their conjecture and relate it to several other problems in…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
In a recent article in American Scientist, Theodore Hill described a coin-tossing game whose pay-off is the number of heads over the total number of throws. Suppose that at a given point during the game you have 5 heads and 3 tails, should…
What is the average number of tosses needed before a particular sequence of heads and tails turns up? We solve the problem didactically, starting with doubles, finding that a tail, followed by a head, turns up on the average after only four…
Common knowledge is crucial for safe group coordination. In its absence, humans must rely on shared knowledge, which is inherently limited in depth and therefore prone to coordination failures, because any finite-order knowledge attribution…
Knockout tournaments, also known as single-elimination or cup tournaments, are a popular form of sports competitions. In the standard probabilistic setting, for each pairing of players, one of the players wins the game with a certain (a…
We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
The pictorial jigsaw (PJ) puzzle is a well-known leisure game for humans. Usually, a PJ puzzle game is played by one or several human players face-to-face in the physical space. In this paper, we focus on how to solve PJ puzzles in the…
We study computational aspects of three prominent voting rules that use approval ballots to elect multiple winners. These rules are satisfaction approval voting, proportional approval voting, and reweighted approval voting. We first show…
The abc conjecture, one of the most famous open problems in number theory, claims that three positive integers satisfying a+b=c cannot simultaneously have significant repetition among their prime factors; in particular, the product of the…
The Connections puzzle published each day by the New York Times tasks players with dividing a bank of sixteen words into four groups of four words that each relate to a common theme. Solving the puzzle requires both common linguistic…
The problem of determining the set of possible eigenvalues of 3 Hermitian matrices that sum up to zero is known as the Horn problem. The answer is a polyhedral cone, which, following Knutson and Tao, can be described as the projection of a…