Related papers: Emptying Sets: The Cookie Monster Problem

In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…

Counter reachability games are played by two players on a graph with labelled edges. Each move consists in picking an edge from the current location and adding its label to a counter vector. The objective is to reach a given counter value…

In a graph $G = (V,E)$, a k-ruling set $S$ is one in which all vertices $V$ \ $S$ are at most $k$ distance from $S$. Finding a minimum k-ruling set is intrinsically linked to the minimum dominating set problem and maximal independent set…

We consider a logical puzzle which we call double pouring problem, which was original defined for $k=3$ vessels. We generalize this definition to $k \ge 2 $ as follows. Each of the $k$ vessels contains an integer amount of water, called its…

The number of quantifiers needed to express first-order properties is captured by two-player combinatorial games called multi-structural (MS) games. We play these games on linear orders and strings, and introduce a technique we call…

We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…

Let $A$ be a nonempty finite set of $k$ integers. Given a subset $B$ of $A$, the sum of all elements of $B$, denoted by $s(B)$, is called the subset sum of $B$. For a nonnegative integer $\alpha$ ($\leq k$), let \[\Sigma_{\alpha}…

We consider election scenarios with incomplete information, a situation that arises often in practice. There are several models of incomplete information and accordingly, different notions of outcomes of such elections. In one well-studied…

In this article, we show how the finding the number of partitions of same size of a positive integer show up in caching networks. We present a stochastic model for caching where user requests (represented with positive integers) are a…

We study minimum integer representations of weighted games, i.e., representations where the weights are integers and every other integer representation is at least as large in each component. Those minimum integer representations, if the…

We recast move generators for solving board games as operations on compressed sets of strings. We aim for compressed representations with space sublinear in the number of game positions for interesting sets of positions, move generation in…

We analyze Solo Chess puzzles, where the input is an $n \times n$ board containing some standard Chess pieces of the same color, and the goal is to make a sequence of capture moves to reduce down to a single piece. Prior work analyzes this…

In this paper, we study the "sum composition problem" between two lists $A$ and $B$ of positive integers. We start by saying that $B$ is "sum composition" of $A$ when there exists an ordered $m$-partition $[A_1,\ldots,A_m]$ of $A$ where $m$…

In many applications we want to find the number of clusters in a dataset. A common approach is to use the penalized k-means algorithm with an additive penalty term linear in the number of clusters. An open problem is estimating the value of…

Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform…

The core of a cooperative game on a set of players $N$ is one of the most popular concept of solution. When cooperation is restricted (feasible coalitions form a subcollection $\cF$ of $2^N$), the core may become unbounded, which makes it…

Since Isaac Newton first studied the Kissing Number Problem in 1694, determining the maximal number of non-overlapping spheres around a central sphere has remained a fundamental challenge. This problem is the local analogue of Hilbert's…

For a set $\cM=\{-\mu,-\mu+1,\ldots, \lambda\}\setminus\{0\}$ with non-negative integers $\lambda,\mu<q$ not both 0, a subset $\cS$ of the residue class ring $\Z_q$ modulo an integer $q\ge 1$ is called a $(\lambda,\mu;q)$-\emph{covering…

Every set of natural numbers determines a generating function convergent for $q \in (-1,1)$ whose behavior as $q \rightarrow 1^-$ determines a germ. These germs admit a natural partial ordering that can be used to compare sets of natural…

We study the query complexity of cake cutting and give lower and upper bounds for computing approximately envy-free, perfect, and equitable allocations with the minimum number of cuts. The lower bounds are tight for computing connected…