Related papers: How good is the Warnsdorff's knight's tour heurist…
Wagering mechanisms are one-shot betting mechanisms that elicit agents' predictions of an event. For deterministic wagering mechanisms, an existing impossibility result has shown incompatibility of some desirable theoretical properties. In…
Real-time heuristic search algorithms are suitable for situated agents that need to make their decisions in constant time. Since the original work by Korf nearly two decades ago, numerous extensions have been suggested. One of the most…
We model the time evolution of single win odds in Japanese horse racing as a stochastic process, deriving an Ornstein--Uhlenbeck process by analyzing the probability dynamics of vote shares and the empirical time series of odds movements.…
The present paper aims to extend the knight's tour problem for $k$-dimensional grids of the form $\{0,1\}^k$ to other fairy chess leapers. Accordingly, we constructively show the existence of closed tours in $2 \times 2 \times \cdots \times…
Order Picker Routing is a critical issue in Warehouse Operations Management. Due to the complexity of the problem and the need for quick solutions, suboptimal algorithms are frequently employed in practice. However, Reinforcement Learning…
Selection HHs are randomised search methodologies which choose and execute heuristics during the optimisation process from a set of low-level heuristics. A machine learning mechanism is generally used to decide which low-level heuristic…
We propose a quantum heuristic algorithm to solve a traveling salesman problem by generalizing Grover search. Sufficient conditions are derived to greatly enhance the probability of finding the tours with extremal costs, reaching almost to…
Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning…
The $n$-queens puzzle is to place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n \times n$ chessboard. We present a simple two stage randomized algorithm to construct such configurations. In the first stage, a random greedy algorithm constructs…
A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…
This paper considers the problem of regression over distributions, which is becoming increasingly important in machine learning. Existing approaches often ignore the geometry of the probability space or are computationally expensive. To…
When trying to find approximate solutions for the Traveling Salesman Problem with heuristic optimization algorithms, small moves called Lin-$k$-Opts are often used. In our paper, we provide exact formulas for the numbers of possible tours…
Gambits are central to human decision-making. Our goal is to provide a theory of Gambits. A Gambit is a combination of psychological and technical factors designed to disrupt predictable play. Chess provides an environment to study gambits…
A tournament is an orientation of a complete graph. A vertex that can reach every other vertex within two steps is called a \emph{king}. We study the complexity of finding $k$ kings in a tournament graph. We show that the randomized query…
The game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem) is a model for sequential decision making with a long history and many variations. The classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings are uniformly distributed.…
Decision making under uncertainty is a key component of many AI settings, and in particular of voting scenarios where strategic agents are trying to reach a joint decision. The common approach to handle uncertainty is by maximizing expected…
The 2-Opt heuristic is a simple improvement heuristic for the Traveling Salesman Problem. It starts with an arbitrary tour and then repeatedly replaces two edges of the tour by two other edges, as long as this yields a shorter tour. We will…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
How many shuffles are needed to mix up a deck of cards? This question may be answered in the language of a random walk on the symmetric group, $S_{52}$. This generalises neatly to the study of random walks on finite groups, themselves a…
We revisit an old minor topic in algorithms, the deterministic walk on a finite graph which always moves toward the nearest unvisited vertex until every vertex is visited. There is an elementary connection between this cover time and…