Related papers: Computing Majority with Triple Queries

Can you decide if there is a coincidence in the numbers counting two different combinatorial objects? For example, can you decide if two regions in $\mathbb{R}^3$ have the same number of domino tilings? There are two versions of the…

We derive closed formulas for the number of $k$-coloured partitions and the number of plane partitions of $n$ in terms of the Bell polynomials.

A majority coloring of a directed graph is a vertex-coloring in which every vertex has the same color as at most half of its out-neighbors. Kreutzer, Oum, Seymour, van der Zypen and Wood proved that every digraph has a majority 4-coloring…

Mastermind is famous two-players game. The first player (codemaker) chooses a secret code which the second player (codebreaker) is supposed to crack within a minimum number of code guesses (queries). Therefore, codemaker's duty is to help…

Winning probabilities of The Hat Game (Ebert's Hat Problem) with three players and three colors are only known in the symmetric case: all probabilities of the colors are equal. This paper solves the asymmetric case: probabilities may be…

The area of computing with uncertainty considers problems where some information about the input elements is uncertain, but can be obtained using queries. For example, instead of the weight of an element, we may be given an interval that is…

Suppose an oracle is known to hold one of a given set of D two-valued functions. To successfully identify which function the oracle holds with k classical queries, it must be the case that D is at most 2^k. In this paper we derive a bound…

The Cyclic Coloring Conjecture asserts that the vertices of every plane graph with maximum face size D can be colored using at most 3D/2 colors in such a way that no face is incident with two vertices of the same color. The Cyclic Coloring…

In many settings people must give numerical scores to entities from a small discrete set. For instance, rating physical attractiveness from 1--5 on dating sites, or papers from 1--10 for conference reviewing. We study the problem of…

Crowdsourcing can solve problems that current fully automated systems cannot. Its effectiveness depends on the reliability, accuracy, and speed of the crowd workers that drive it. These objectives are frequently at odds with one another.…

The Unfriendly Partition Conjecture posits that every countable graph admits a 2-colouring in which for each vertex there are at least as many bichromatic edges containing that vertex as monochromatic ones. This is not known in general, but…

We analyze the general version of the classic guessing game Mastermind with $n$ positions and $k$ colors. Since the case $k \le n^{1-\varepsilon}$, $\varepsilon>0$ a constant, is well understood, we concentrate on larger numbers of colors.…

There are many extremely challenging problems about existence of monochromatic arithmetic progressions in colorings of groups. Many theorems hold only for abelian groups as results on non-abelian groups are often much more difficult to…

Large language models increasingly rely on explicit reasoning chains and can produce multiple plausible responses for a given context. We study the candidate sampler that produces the set of plausible responses contrasting the ancestral…

For a fixed integer $q$, the $q$-Coloring problem asks to decide if a given graph has a vertex coloring with $q$ colors such that no two adjacent vertices receive the same color. In a series of papers, it has been shown that for every $q…

We consider an urn model, whose replacement matrix has all entries nonnegative and is balanced, that is, has constant row sums. We obtain the rates of the counts of balls corresponding to each color for the strong laws to hold. The analysis…

For the most general Polya urn schemes, we establish the almost sure convergence of its composition. The only requirement is that there are always enough balls of both colors, so that the extractions can be indefinitely pursued according to…

We study a quantitative Ramsey-type problem on 3-term arithmetic progressions: how should the set of integers $[n] = \{1, 2, \dots, n\}$ be colored using 3 colors in order to maximize the number of rainbow 3-term arithmetic progressions? By…

Most convex and nonconvex clustering algorithms come with one crucial parameter: the $k$ in $k$-means. To this day, there is not one generally accepted way to accurately determine this parameter. Popular methods are simple yet theoretically…

We study the problem of identifying an initially unknown $m$-bit number by using yes-no questions when up to a fixed number $e$ of the answers can be erroneous. In the variant we consider here questions are restricted to be the union of up…