Related papers: Bachet's Problem: as few weights to weigh them all

Pancake flipping, a famous open problem in computer science, can be formalised as the problem of sorting a permutation of positive integers using as few prefix reversals as possible. In that context, a prefix reversal of length k reverses…

We prove polynomial-time solvability of a large class of clustering problems where a weighted set of items has to be partitioned into clusters with respect to some balancing constraints. The data points are weighted with respect to…

We show that packing axis-aligned unit squares into a simple polygon $P$ is NP-hard, even when $P$ is an orthogonal and orthogonally convex polygon with half-integer coordinates. It has been known since the early 80s that packing unit…

Packing is a classical problem where one is given a set of subsets of Euclidean space called objects, and the goal is to find a maximum size subset of objects that are pairwise non-intersecting. The problem is also known as the Independent…

In 1907, Henry Ernest Dudeney posed a puzzle: ``cut any equilateral triangle \dots\ into as few pieces as possible that will fit together and form a perfect square'' (without overlap, via translation and rotation). Four weeks later, Dudeney…

The classical Busemann-Petty problem (1956) asks, whether origin-symmetric convex bodies in $\mathbb {R}^n$ with smaller hyperplane central sections necessarily have smaller volumes. It is known, that the answer is affirmative if $n\le 4$…

Finding diverse solutions in combinatorial problems recently has received considerable attention (Baste et al. 2020; Fomin et al. 2020; Hanaka et al. 2021). In this paper we study the following type of problems: given an integer $k$, the…

Recently, Andrews and El Bachraoui considered the number of integer partitions whose smallest part is repeated exactly $k$ times and the remaining parts are not repeated. They presented several interesting results and posed questions…

We consider two well-known natural variants of bin packing, and show that these packing problems admit asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation schemes (AFPTAS). In bin packing problems, a set of one-dimensional items of size at most…

In 2000, J. Shallit introduced a special partial ordering of a subset of positive integers and proposed the problem of finding the set of minimal elements with respect to this ordering. Shallit himself solved this problem for the set of…

The problem that we consider is the following: given an $n \times n$ array $A$ of positive numbers, find a tiling using at most $p$ rectangles (which means that each array element must be covered by some rectangle and no two rectangles must…

The multivariate integer Chebyshev problem is to find polynomials with integer coefficients that minimize the supremum norm over a compact set in $\C^d.$ We study this problem on general sets, but devote special attention to product sets…

Until this work, the packing radius of a poset code was only known in the cases where the poset was a chain, a hierarchy, a union of disjoint chains of the same size, and for some families of codes. Our objective is to approach the general…

A problem faced by many instructors is that of designing exams that accurately assess the abilities of the students. Typically these exams are prepared several days in advance, and generic question scores are used based on rough…

Rademacher complexity is often used to characterize the learnability of a hypothesis class and is known to be related to the class size. We leverage this observation and introduce a new technique for estimating the size of an arbitrary…

In our setting enumeration amounts to generate all solutions of a problem instance without duplicates. We address the problem of enumerating the models of B-formulae. A B-formula is a propositional formula whose connectives are taken from a…

A vanishing sum of roots of unity is called minimal if no proper, nonempty sub-sum of it vanishes. This paper classifies all minimal vanishing sums of roots of unity of weight at most 16 by hand, thereby uncovering new phenomena beyond the…

We introduce the subset assignment problem in which items of varying sizes are placed in a set of bins with limited capacity. Items can be replicated and placed in any subset of the bins. Each (item, subset) pair has an associated cost. Not…

In the preceding decade, Andrews and Newman resurrected the concept of a `minimal excludant' of a partition ($mex$, for short), namely, the least positive missing integer in a partition. Subsequently, several authors have not only studied…

The problem of rectangle tiling binary arrays is defined as follows. Given an $n \times n$ array $A$ of zeros and ones and a natural number $p$, our task is to partition $A$ into at most $p$ rectangular tiles, so that the maximal weight of…