Related papers: Baron Munchhausen's Sequence
Discuss several tricks for solving twenty question problems which in this paper is depicted as a guessing game. Player tries to find a ball in twenty boxes by asking as few questions as possible, and these questions are answered by only…
We study the Colored Bin Packing Problem: we are given a set of items where each item has a weight and color. We must pack the items in bins of uniform capacity such that no two items of the same color may be adjacent within in a bin. The…
A classic three-jug puzzle asks, given three jugs $A$, $B$, and $C$ with fixed maximum capacities, with jug $A$ filled with wine to its maximum capacity, whether is it possible to divide the wine into two halves by pouring it from one jug…
Lothar Collatz had proposed in 1937 a conjecture in number theory called Collatz conjecture. Till today there is no evidence of proving or disproving the conjecture. In this paper, we propose an algorithmic approach for verification of the…
A quantum board game is a multi-round protocol between a single quantum player against the quantum board. Molina and Watrous discovered quantum hedging. They gave an example for perfect quantum hedging: a board game with winning probability…
For a finite poset $P$, we study the expected size of the intersection of two independent uniformly random antichains. Equivalently, we evaluate the sum of $|A\cap A'|$ over all ordered pairs of antichains. For general posets this statistic…
We study in this paper a generalized coupon collector problem, which consists in determining the distribution and the moments of the time needed to collect a given number of distinct coupons that are drawn from a set of coupons with an…
The quantum random walk has been much studied recently, largely due to its highly nonclassical behavior. In this paper, we study one possible route to classical behavior for the discrete quantum walk on the line: the presence of decoherence…
A necklace can be considered as a cyclic list of $n$ red and $n$ blue beads in an arbitrary order, and the goal is to fold it into two and find a large cross-free matching of pairs of beads of different colors. We give a counterexample for…
We introduce a family of block-additive automatic sequences, that are obtained by allocating a weight to each couple of digits, and defining the $n$th term of the sequence as being the total weight of the integer $n$ written in base $k$.…
An algorithm for obtaining all n\times n binary matrices having exactly 2 units in every row and every column is described in the paper. After analysing the work of the algorithm a formula for calculating the number of these matrices has…
Let $\pi_n$ be a uniformly chosen random permutation on $[n]$. Using an analysis of the probability that two overlapping consecutive $k$-permutations are order isomorphic, the authors of a recent paper showed that the expected number of…
Cheating in examinations is acknowledged by an increasing number of organizations to be widespread. We examine two different approaches to assess their effectiveness at detecting anomalous results, suggestive of collusion, using data taken…
Consider these two distinct combinatorial objects: (1) the necklaces of length $n$ with at most $q$ colors, and (2) the multisets of integers modulo $n$ with subset sum divisible by $n$ and with the multiplicity of each element being…
Within a special multi-coin quantum walk scheme we analyze the effect of the entanglement of the initial coin state. For states with a special entanglement structure it is shown that this entanglement can be meausured with the mean value of…
This article demonstrates, using numerous examples of varying complexity, how one can visually prove summation formulas involving binomial coefficients by exclusively using the recurrence relation for binomial coefficients and its…
We harness both human ingenuity and the power of symbolic computation to study the number of coin tosses until reaching $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails. We also talk about the closely related problem of reaching $n$ Heads and $m$ Tails. This paper…
Ring puzzles are tessellations of the Euclidean plane respecting local constraints around vertices. Such puzzles may arise in geometric group theory, for example, as embedded flat planes in certain CAT(0) complexes of dimension 2. In the…
A problem that enjoys an enduring popularity asks: "what is the least number of pound weights that can be used on a scale pan to weigh any integral number of pounds from 1 to 40 inclusive, if the weights can be placed in either of the scale…
Recently a systematic investigation of monoids of sequences of plus-minus weighted zero-sum sequences had been started, which is among others motivated by applications to monoids of norms of algebraic integers. In the current paper these…