Related papers: Computing Majority with Triple Queries

We study a P\'olya-type urn model defined as follows. Start at time 0 with a single ball of some colour. Then, at each time n>0, choose a ball from the urn uniformly at random. With probability 1/2<p<1, return the ball to the urn along with…

An urn contains balls of d colors. At each time, a ball is drawn and then replaced together with a random number of balls of the same color. Assuming that some colors are dominated by others, we prove central limit theorems. Some…

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…

Consider a P\'olya urn where a drawn ball of colour $i$ is replaced together with a fixed number $m_i$ of balls of the same colour. We give a simple proof that if, for example, there are two colours and the urn starts with more balls of…

Population protocols are a model of distributed computing where $n$ agents, each a simple finite-state machine, interact in pairs to solve a common task against a (adversarial) interaction scheduler. This model was intensively studied in…

Suppose we have three independent copies of a regular diffusion on $[0,1]$ with absorbing boundaries. Of these diffusions, either at least two are absorbed at the upper boundary or at least two at the lower boundary. In this way, they…

We study computational aspects of three prominent voting rules that use approval ballots to elect multiple winners. These rules are satisfaction approval voting, proportional approval voting, and reweighted approval voting. We first show…

We consider a puzzle such that a set of colored cubes is given as an instance. Each cube has unit length on each edge and its surface is colored so that what we call the Surface Color Condition is satisfied. Given a palette of six colors,…

Suppose that the vertices of a graph $G$ are colored with two colors in an unknown way. The color that occurs on more than half of the vertices is called the majority color (if it exists), and any vertex of this color is called a majority…

In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear…

Several variations of hat guessing games have been popularly discussed in recreational mathematics. In a typical hat guessing game, after initially coordinating a strategy, each of $n$ players is assigned a hat from a given color set.…

Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…

We consider in this paper an urn and ball problem with replacement, where balls are with different colors and are drawn uniformly from a unique urn. The numbers of balls with a given color are i.i.d. random variables with a heavy tailed…

We generalize Ebert's Hat Problem for three persons and three colors. All players guess simultaneously the color of their own hat observing only the hat colors of the other players. It is also allowed for each player to pass: no color is…

A majority coloring of an undirected graph is a vertex coloring in which for each vertex there are at least as many bi-chromatic edges containing that vertex as monochromatic ones. It is known that for every countable graph a majority…

Consider the following process whereby $n$ balls are distributed into $k$ bins. Repeatedly, a ball is removed from a non-empty bin chosen uniformly at random. The process ends when a single non-empty bin remains. Will Ma…

Since the 1960s Mastermind has been studied for the combinatorial and information theoretical interest the game has to offer. Many results have been discovered starting with Erd\H{o}s and R\'enyi determining the optimal number of queries…

Introducing the simplest of all No-Signalling Games: the RGB Game where two verifiers interrogate two provers, Alice and Bob, far enough from each other that communication between them is too slow to be possible. Each prover may be…

We study the probability of making an error if, by querying an oracle a fixed number of times, we declare constant a randomly chosen n-bit Boolean function. We compare the classical and the quantum case, and we determine for how many…

We consider three algorithms for allocating parliamentary seats by proportional representation. The usual approach to describing such algorithms is to compute a quota of votes that each party uses to "acquire'' representatives. This kind of…