Related papers: Computing Majority with Triple Queries
Suppose an urn contains initially any number of balls of two colours. One ball is drawn randomly and then put back with $\alpha$ balls of the same colour and $\beta$ balls of the opposite colour. Both cases, $\beta=0$ and $\beta>0$ are well…
We consider an urn model with multiple drawing and random time-dependent addition matrix. The model is very general with respect to previous literature: the number of sampled balls at each time-step is random, the addition matrix has…
N players are randomly fitted with a colored hat (q different colors). All players guess simultaneously the color of their own hat observing only the hat colors of the other N-1 players. The team wins if all players guess right. No…
Consider a quantum computer in combination with a binary oracle of domain size N. It is shown how N/2+sqrt(N) calls to the oracle are sufficient to guess the whole content of the oracle (being an N bit string) with probability greater than…
Quality assurance remains a key topic in human computation research. Prior work indicates that majority voting is effective for low difficulty tasks, but has limitations for harder tasks. This paper explores two methods of addressing 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…
A neat 1972 result of Pohl asserts that [3n/2]-2 comparisons are sufficient, and also necessary in the worst case, for finding both the minimum and the maximum of an n-element totally ordered set. The set is accessed via an oracle for…
We complete the study of the model introduced in [11]. It is a two-color urn model with multiple drawing and random (non-balanced) time-dependent reinforcement matrix. The number of sampled balls at each time-step is random. We identify the…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
Consider an urn model whose replacement matrix is triangular, has all entries nonnegative and the row sums are all equal to one. We obtain the strong laws for the counts of balls corresponding to each color. The scalings for these laws…
Suppose $k$ balls are dropped into $n$ boxes independently with uniform probability, where $n, k$ are large with ratio approximately equal to some positive real $\lambda$. The maximum box count has a counterintuitive behavior: first of all,…
We consider the {\em clustering with diversity} problem: given a set of colored points in a metric space, partition them into clusters such that each cluster has at least $\ell$ points, all of which have distinct colors. We give a…
Compared with constraint satisfaction problems, counting problems have received less attention. In this paper, we survey research works on the problems of counting the number of solutions to constraints. The constraints may take various…
We identify and investigate a computational model arising in molecular computing, social computing and sensor network. The model is made of of multiple agents who are computationally limited and posses no global information. The agents may…
There is no trivial mathematics, there are only trivial mathematicians! A mathematician is trivial if he or she believes that there exists trivial mathematics. Being a non-trivial mathematician myself, I will describe ten different proofs…
Mathematics has been used in the exploration and enumeration of juggling patterns. In the case when we catch and throw one ball at a time the number of possible juggling patterns is well-known. When we are allowed to catch and throw any…
We study the number of factorizations of a positive integer, where the parts of the factorization are of l different colors (or kinds). Recursive or explicit formulas are derived for the case of unordered and ordered, distinct and…
We study several exactly solvable Polya-Eggenberger urn models with a \emph{diminishing} character, namely, balls of a specified color, say $x$ are completely drawn after a finite number of draws. The main quantity of interest here is the…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and…