Related papers: Faster Treasure Hunt and Better Strongly Universal…
Unbounded SubsetSum is a classical textbook problem: given integers $w_1,w_2,\cdots,w_n\in [1,u],~c,u$, we need to find if there exists $m_1,m_2,\cdots,m_n\in \mathbb{N}$ satisfying $c=\sum_{i=1}^n w_im_i$. In its all-target version, $t\in…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
In many real-world problems and applications, finding only a single element, even though the best, among all possible candidates, cannot fully meet the requirements. We may wish to have a collection where each individual is not only…
Two mobile agents, starting from different nodes of a network modeled as a graph, and woken up at possibly different times, have to meet at the same node. This problem is known as rendezvous. We consider deterministic distributed rendezvous…
In 1983, Aldous proved that randomization can speedup local search. For example, it reduces the query complexity of local search over [1:n]^d from Theta (n^{d-1}) to O (d^{1/2}n^{d/2}). It remains open whether randomization helps…
The Pandora's Box Problem, originally formalized by Weitzman in 1979, models selection from set of random, alternative options, when evaluation is costly. This includes, for example, the problem of hiring a skilled worker, where only one…
Parity games have witnessed several new quasi-polynomial algorithms since the breakthrough result of Calude et al. (STOC 2017). The combinatorial object underlying these approaches is a universal tree, as identified by Czerwi\'nski et al.…
In the online sorting problem, $n$ items are revealed one by one and have to be placed (immediately and irrevocably) into empty cells of a size-$n$ array. The goal is to minimize the sum of absolute differences between items in consecutive…
We study partial and budgeted versions of the well studied connected dominating set problem. In the partial connected dominating set problem, we are given an undirected graph G = (V,E) and an integer n', and the goal is to find a minimum…
Recent work on exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) has led to a series of increasingly complex solutions to the problem. This increase in complexity often comes at the expense of generality. Recent empirical studies suggest that,…
A graph environment must be explored by a collection of mobile robots. Some of the robots, a priori unknown, may turn out to be unreliable. The graph is weighted and each node is assigned a deadline. The exploration is successful if each…
In this paper, the authors investigate the Deep Sea Treasure (DST) problem as proposed by Vamplew et al. Through a number of proofs, the authors show the original DST problem to be quite basic, and not always representative of practical…
The problem of universal search and stop using an adaptive search policy is considered. When the target location is searched, the observation is distributed according to the target distribution, otherwise it is distributed according to the…
We consider the problem of collaborative tree exploration posed by Fraigniaud, Gasieniec, Kowalski, and Pelc where a team of $k$ agents is tasked to collectively go through all the edges of an unknown tree as fast as possible. Denoting by…
We show new algorithms and constructions over linear delta-matroids. We observe an alternative representation for linear delta-matroids, as a contraction representation over a skew-symmetric matrix. This is equivalent to the more standard…
In this paper, we study the treasure hunt problem in a graph by a mobile agent. The nodes in the graph $G=(V,E)$ are anonymous and the edges incident to a vertex $v\in V$ whose degree is $deg(v)$ are labeled arbitrarily as $0,1,\ldots,…
Consider the following generalization of the classic binary search problem: a searcher is required to find a hidden vertex $x$ in a tree $T$. To do so, they iteratively perform queries to an oracle, each about a chosen vertex $v$. After…
We consider an orienteering problem (OP) where an agent needs to visit a series (possibly a subset) of depots, from which the maximal accumulated profits are desired within given limited time budget. Different from most existing works where…
We study the problem of collective tree exploration (CTE) where a team of $k$ agents is tasked to traverse all the edges of an unknown tree as fast as possible, assuming complete communication between the agents. In this paper, we present…
Permutation pattern-avoidance is a central concept of both enumerative and extremal combinatorics. In this paper we study the effect of permutation pattern-avoidance on the complexity of optimization problems. In the context of the dynamic…