Related papers: The equalization probability of the Polya urn
We consider the one-round Voronoi game, where player one (``White'', called ``Wilma'') places a set of n points in a rectangular area of aspect ratio r <=1, followed by the second player (``Black'', called ``Barney''), who places the same…
We prove matching direct and inverse theorems for (algebraic) polynomial approximation with doubling weights $w$ having finitely many zeros and singularities (i.e., points where $w$ becomes infinite) on an interval and not too ``rapidly…
We consider a version of the classical Ehrenfest urn model with two urns and two types of balls: regular and heavy. Each ball is selected independently according to a Poisson process having rate $1$ for regular balls and rate…
Consider a game where a refereed a referee chooses (x,y) according to a publicly known distribution P_XY, sends x to Alice, and y to Bob. Without communicating with each other, Alice responds with a value "a" and Bob responds with a value…
We present three versions of the classic two-pile game \textsc{one-or-one-or-one-of-both} generalized to the multi-pile context. In each case, we explore the resulting $\mathcal{P}$-positions. In the first version, there is a simple…
We study the joint asymptotics of forward and backward processes of numbers of non-empty urns in an infinite urn scheme. The probabilities of balls hitting the urns are assumed to satisfy the conditions of regular decrease. We prove weak…
We introduce a new class of balanced allocation processes which bias towards underloaded bins (those with load below the mean load) either by skewing the probability by which a bin is chosen for an allocation (probability bias), or…
For any partition of a positive integer we consider the chess (or draughts) colouring of its associated Ferrers graph. Let b denote the total number of black unit squares, and w the number of white squares. In this note we characterize all…
In the context of voting with ranked ballots, an important class of voting rules is the class of margin-based rules (also called pairwise rules). A voting rule is margin-based if whenever two elections generate the same head-to-head margins…
We consider a time-dependent version of a P\'olya urn containing black and white balls. At each time $n$ a ball is drawn from the urn at random and replaced in the urn along with $\sigma_n$ additional balls of the same colour. The…
A P\'olya urn process is a Markov chain that models the evolution of an urn containing some coloured balls, the set of possible colours being $\{1,\ldots,d\}$ for $d\in \mathbb{N}$. At each time step, a random ball is chosen uniformly in…
Sanov's Theorem and the Conditional Limit Theorem (CoLT) are established for a multicolor Polya Eggenberger urn sampling scheme, giving the Polya divergence and the Polya extension to the Maximum Relative Entropy (MaxEnt) method. Polya…
The draw of some knockout tournaments requires finding a perfect matching in a balanced bipartite graph. The problem becomes challenging with draw constraints: the two draw procedures used in sports are known to be non-uniformly distributed…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
We determine the probability $P$ of two independent events $A$ and $B$, which occur randomly $n_A$ and $n_B$ times during a total time $T$ and last for $t_A$ and $t_B$, to occur simultaneously at some point during $T$. Therefore we first…
We study the Euler-Frobenius numbers, a generalization of the Eulerian numbers, and the probability distribution obtained by normalizing them. This distribution can be obtained by rounding a sum of independent uniform random variables; this…
We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and…
Noga Alon and Yaakov Malinovsky recently studied the following game: you start at 0, and keep rolling a fair standard die, and add the outcomes until the sum happens to be prime. We generalize this in several ways, illustrating the power of…
Consider a rooted Galton-Watson tree $T$, to each of whose edges we assign, independently, a weight that equals $+1$ with probability $p_{1}$, $0$ with probability $p_{0}$ and $-1$ with probability $p_{-1}=1-p_{1}-p_{0}$. We play a game on…
Children, sitting in a circle, each have a nonnegative number of candies in front of them. A whistle is blown and each child with more than one candy passes one candy to the left and one to the right. The sharing process is repeated until a…