Related papers: Cookie Monster Devours Naccis
In this paper we study a variant of the Malicious Ma\^{i}tre d' problem. This problem, attributed to computer scientist Rob Pike in Peter Winkler's book "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection", involves seating diners around a…
We discuss ways in which the black-box model for computation is or is not applicable to the Monster sporadic simple group. Conversely, we consider whether methods of computation in the Monster can be generalised to other situations, for…
The aim of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey of cubic Fibonacci identities, trying to uncover as many as possible. From the outset, our rationale for a very careful search on an apparently obscure problem was not only a matter…
The Maker-Breaker total domination number, $\gamma_{\rm MBT}(G)$, of a graph $G$ is introduced as the minimum number of moves of Dominator to win the Maker-Breaker total domination game, provided that he has a winning strategy and is the…
The class of Poset Take-Away games includes many interesting and difficult games. Playing on an $n$-dimensional positive quadrant (the origin being the bottom of the poset) gives rise to nim, wythoff's nim and chomp. These are impartial…
The Snake-in-the-Box problem is that of finding a longest induced path in an $n$-dimensional hypercube. We prove new lower bounds for the values $n\in \{11,12,13\}$. The Coil-in-the-Box problem is that of finding a longest induced cycle in…
The Nakamura number is an appropriate invariant of a simple game to study the existence of social equilibria and the possibility of cycles. For symmetric quota games its number can be obtained by an easy formula. For some subclasses of…
Consider the commonly known puzzle, given $k$ glass balls, find an optimal algorithm to determine the lowest floor of a building of $n$ floors from which a thrown glass ball will break. This puzzle was originally posed in its original form…
Scrambling the standard 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube corresponds to a random walk on a group containing approximately 43 quintillion elements. Viewing the random walk as a Markov chain, its mixing time determines the number of random moves required…
The aim of these lecture notes, based on lectures given by the second author at the CIME school in Cetraro, is to illustrate a range of ideas surrounding higher Teichmuller spaces of Riemann surfaces with marked boundaries through explicit…
We prove several results addressing the envy-free division problem in the presence of an unpredictable (secretive) player, called the "dragon". There are two basic scenarios. 1. There are $r-1$ players and a dragon. Once the "cake" is…
In the Maker-Breaker domination game played on a graph $G$, Dominator's goal is to select a dominating set and Staller's goal is to claim a closed neighborhood of some vertex. We study the cases when Staller can win the game. If Dominator…
An {\it Omnibus Sequence} of length $n$ is one that has each possible "message" of length $k$ embedded in it as a subsequence. We study various properties of Omnibus Sequences in this paper, making connections, whenever possible, to the…
The game of Cops and Robbers on graphs is a well-studied pursuit--evasion model whose central parameter, the cop number, captures the minimum number of pursuers required to guarantee capture of an adversary on a given graph. While the cop…
By using two different invariants for the Rubik's Magic puzzle, one of metric type, the other of topological type, we can dramatically reduce the universe of constructible configurations of the puzzle. Finding the set of actually…
We consider here the problem of classifying orbits of an action of the dif- feomorphism group of 3-space on a tower of fibrations with P2-fibers that generalize the Monster Tower due to Montgomery and Zhitomirskii. As a corollary we give…
Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers; a similar result holds for other positive linear recurrence sequences. These legal decompositions can be used to…
In this note, we introduce a distributed twist on the classic coupon collector problem: a set of $m$ collectors wish to each obtain a set of $n$ coupons; for this, they can each sample coupons uniformly at random, but can also meet in…
We prove a tight quantum query lower bound $\Omega(n^{k/(k+1)})$ for the problem of deciding whether there exist $k$ numbers among $n$ that sum up to a prescribed number, provided that the alphabet size is sufficiently large. This is an…
A camel can carry $B$ bananas on its back. It can have $2$ bananas at a time in its stomach. For each mile the camel walks, the amount of bananas in its stomach decreases $1$. As soon as the amount of bananas in the camel's stomach is at…