Related papers: Baron Munchhausen's Sequence
Take a look around you -- in your family, your school or workplace, in the streets, and you see boys & girls in about equal proportion, and without any easily visible gender patterns in case of siblings. So, to the famous first order of…
Using a bijective proof, we show the number of ways to arrange a maximum number of nonattacking pawns on a $2m\times 2m$ chessboard is ${2m\choose m}^2$, and more generally, the number of ways to arrange a maximum number of nonattacking…
We investigate the number of squares in a very broad family of binary recurrence sequences with $u_{0}=1$. We show that there are at most two distinct squares in such sequences (the best possible result), except under such very special…
The toss of a coin is usually regarded as the epitome of randomness, and has been used for ages as a means to resolve disputes in a simple, fair way. Perhaps as ancient as consulting objects such as coins and dice is the art of maliciously…
Guo-Niu Han [arXiv:2006.14070 [math.CO]] has introduced a new combinatorial object named standard puzzle. We use digraphs to show the relations between numbers in standard puzzles and propose a skeleton model. By this model, we solve the…
In late May of 2014 I received an email from a colleague introducing to me a non-transitive game developed by Walter Penney. This paper explores this probability game from the perspective of a coin tossing game, and further discusses some…
The article proposes a heuristic approximation approach to the bin packing problem under multiple objectives. In addition to the traditional objective of minimizing the number of bins, the heterogeneousness of the elements in each bin is…
Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…
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…
We find out the number of different partitions of an n-kilogram stone into the minimum number of parts so that all integral weights from 1 to n kilograms can be weighed in one weighing using the parts of any of the partitions on a two-pan…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
In a multiple-object auction, every bidder tries to win as many objects as possible with a bidding algorithm. This paper studies position-randomized auctions, which form a special class of multiple-object auctions where a bidding algorithm…
The linear complexity of a sequence $s$ is one of the measures of its predictability. It represents the smallest degree of a linear recursion which the sequence satisfies. There are several algorithms to find the linear complexity of a…
A new object of the probability theory, two-sided chain of events (symbols), is introduced. A theory of multi-steps Markov chains with long-range memory, proposed earlier in Phys. Rev. E 68, 06117 (2003), is developed and used to establish…
Hofstadter's Q-sequence remains an enigma fifty years after its introduction. Initially, the terms of the sequence increase monotonically by 0 or 1 at a time. But, Q(12)=8 while Q(11)=6, and monotonicity fails shortly thereafter. In this…
The change-making problem consists of representing a certain amount of money with the least possible number of coins, from a given, pre-established set of denominations. The greedy algorithm works by choosing the coins of largest possible…
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…
We generalize the problem of coin flipping to more than two outcomes and parties. We term this problem dice rolling, and study both its weak and strong variants. We prove by construction that in quantum settings (i) weak N-sided dice…
A probabilistic version of the Bernstein-Vazirani problem (which is a generalization of the original Bernstein-Vazirani problem) and a quantum algorithm to solve it are proposed. The problem involves finding one or more secret keys from a…
This paper considers a generalized version of the coin weighing problem with a spring scale that lies at the intersection of group testing and compressed sensing problems. Given a collection of $n\geq 2$ coins of total weight $d$ (for a…