Related papers: Cookie Monster Devours Naccis
In the chasing convex bodies problem, an online player receives a request sequence of $N$ convex sets $K_1,\dots, K_N$ contained in a normed space $\mathbb R^d$. The player starts at $x_0\in \mathbb R^d$, and after observing each $K_n$…
We study once-excited random walks on general trees, modeled by placing a single "cookie" at each vertex. Each cookie acts as a metaphorical reward that is consumed upon the first visit to the vertex where the cookie is placed. On that…
Burnt pancakes problem was defined by Gates and Papadimitriou in 1979. A stack $S$ of pancakes with a burnt side must be sorted by size, the smallest on top, and each pancake with burnt side down. The only operation allowed is to split…
The classical Domino problem asks whether there exists a tiling in which none of the forbidden patterns given as input appear. In this paper, we consider the aperiodic version of the Domino problem: given as input a family of forbidden…
We investigate the following version of the well-known R\'enyi-Ulam game. Two players - the Questioner and the Responder - play against each other. The Responder thinks of a number from the set $\{1,\ldots,n\}$, and the Questioner has to…
Browser fingerprinting is a relatively new method of uniquely identifying browsers that can be used to track web users. In some ways it is more privacy-threatening than tracking via cookies, as users have no direct control over it. A number…
Learning to program has become common in schools, higher education and individual learning. Although testing is an important aspect of programming, it is often neglected in education due to a perceived lack of time and knowledge, or simply…
The Illumination Problem may be phrased as the problem of covering a convex body in Euclidean $n$-space by a minimum number of translates of its interior. By a probabilistic argument, we show that, arbitrarily close to the Euclidean ball,…
The author presents two tricks to accelerate depth-first search algorithms for a class of combinatorial puzzle problems, such as tiling a tray by a fixed set of polyominoes. The first trick is to implement each assumption of the search with…
Knot mosaics are used to model physical quantum states. The mosaic number of a knot is the smallest integer $m$ such that the knot can be represented as a knot $m$-mosaic. In this paper we establish an upper bound for the crossing number of…
Weird numbers are abundant numbers that are not pseudoperfect. Since their introduction, the existence of odd weird numbers has been an open problem. In this work, we describe our computational effort to search for odd weird numbers, which…
Mastermind is a popular board game released in 1971, where a codemaker chooses a secret pattern of colored pegs, and a codebreaker has to guess it in several trials. After each attempt, the codebreaker gets a response from the codemaker…
We speculate on the distribution of primes in exponentially growing, linear recurrence sequences $(u_n)_{n\geq 0}$ in the integers. By tweaking a heuristic which is successfully used to predict the number of prime values of polynomials, we…
Recent observations of destructive quantum interference in single-molecule junctions confirm the role played by quantum effects in the electronic conductance properties of molecular systems. We show here that the destructive interference…
Several articles deal with tilings with various shapes, and also a very frequent type of combinatorics is to examine the walks on graphs or on grids. We combine these two things and give the numbers of the shortest walks crossing the tiled…
This paper provides analysis to a generalized version of the coupon collector problem, in which the collector gets $d$ distinct coupons each run and she chooses the one that she has the least so far. On the asymptotic case when the number…
Permutation puzzles, such as the Rubik's Cube and the 15 puzzle, are enjoyed by the general public and mathematicians alike. Here we introduce quantum versions of permutation puzzles where the pieces of the puzzles are replaced with…
We settle the existence of certain "anti-magic" cubes using combinatorial block designs and graph decompositions to align a handful of small examples.
We consider a nearest-neighbor random walk on $\mathbb{Z}$ whose probability $\omega_x(j)$ to jump to the right from site $x$ depends not only on $x$ but also on the number of prior visits $j$ to $x$. The collection…
The Tribonacci sequence $\mathbb{T}$ is the fixed point of the substitution $\sigma(a,b,c)=(ab,ac,a)$. The main result is twofold: (1) we give the explicit expressions of the numbers of distinct squares and cubes in $\mathbb{T}[1,n]$ (the…