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The crossing resolution of a non-planar drawing of a graph is the value of the minimum angle formed by any pair of crossing edges. Recent experiments have shown that the larger the crossing resolution is, the easier it is to read and…
In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…
We introduce the game of Cat Herding, where an omnipresent herder slowly cuts down a graph until an evasive cat player has nowhere to go. The number of cuts made is the score of a game, and we study the score under optimal play. In this…
We study optimization problems whereby the optimization variable is a probability measure. Since the probability space is not a vector space, many classical and powerful methods for optimization (e.g., gradients) are of little help. Thus,…
A \emph{saddlepoint} of an $n \times n$ matrix is an entry that is the maximum of its row and the minimum of its column. Saddlepoints give the \emph{value} of a two-player zero-sum game, corresponding to its pure-strategy Nash equilibria;…
A rotor-router walk on a graph is a deterministic process, in which each vertex is endowed with a rotor that points to one of the neighbors. A particle located at some vertex first rotates the rotor in a prescribed order, and then it is…
Chess and chance are seemingly strange bedfellows. Luck and/or randomness have no apparent role in move selection when the game is played at the highest levels. However, when competition is at the ultimate level, that of the World Chess…
Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…
The trade-off between the cost of acquiring and processing data, and uncertainty due to a lack of data is fundamental in machine learning. A basic instance of this trade-off is the problem of deciding when to make noisy and costly…
Do neural networks learn to implement algorithms such as look-ahead or search "in the wild"? Or do they rely purely on collections of simple heuristics? We present evidence of learned look-ahead in the policy network of Leela Chess Zero,…
This paper revisits the classical problem of determining the bias of a weighted coin, where the bias is known to be either $p = 1/2 + \varepsilon$ or $p = 1/2 - \varepsilon$, while minimizing the expected number of coin tosses and the error…
The game of Hex has two players who take turns placing stones of their respective colors on the hexagons of a rhombus-shaped hexagonal grid. Black wins by completing a crossing between two opposite edges, while White wins by completing a…
The Hamiltonian cycle problem (HCP), which is an NP-complete problem, consists of having a graph G with n nodes and m edges and finding the path that connects each node exactly once. In this paper we compare some algorithms to solve a…
In each round of a Swiss-system tournament, players of similar score are paired against each other. An intentional early loss therefore might lead to weaker opponents in later rounds and thus to a better final tournament result - a…
Path-planning algorithms are an important part of a wide variety of robotic applications, such as mobile robot navigation and robot arm manipulation. However, in large search spaces in which local traps may exist, it remains challenging to…
This work revisits quantum algorithms for the well-known welded tree problem, proposing a very succinct quantum algorithm based on the simplest coined quantum walks. It simply iterates the naturally defined coined quantum walk operator for…
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most extensively researched and widely applied combinatorial optimization problems. It is NP-hard even in the symmetric and metric case. Building upon elaborate research, state-of-the-art…
We present a polynomial complexity, deterministic, heuristic for solving the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem (HCP) in an undirected graph of order $n$. Although finding a Hamiltonian cycle is not theoretically guaranteed, we have observed that…
Pairwise comparisons are a well-known method for modelling of the subjective preferences of a decision maker. A popular implementation of the method is based on solving an eigenvalue problem for M - the matrix of pairwise comparisons. This…
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in travel applications that provide on-site personalized tourist spot recommendations. While generally helpful, most available options offer choices based solely on static information on…