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This paper presents a case study on how to process cooking recipes (and more generally, how-to instructions) in a way that makes it possible for a robot or artificial cooking assistant to support human chefs in the kitchen. Such AI…
This paper explores special arrangements of clues in $m \times n$ Numbrix puzzles. The maximum number of clues which fails to define an $m \times n$ puzzle is demonstrated for all $m$ and $n$. In addition, a small upper bound on the minimum…
We study the proportional chore division problem where a protocol wants to divide an undesirable object, called chore, among $n$ different players. The goal is to find an allocation such that the cost of the chore assigned to each player be…
In a recent talk of Robbert Fokkink, some conjectures related to the infinite Tribonacci word were stated by the speaker and the audience. In this note we show how to prove (or disprove) the claims easily in a "purely mechanical" fashion,…
This paper solves a pursuit-evasion problem in which a prince must find a princess who is constrained to move on each day from one vertex of a finite graph to another. Unlike the related and much studied `Cops and Robbers Game', the prince…
Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers; a similar result, though with a different notion of a legal decomposition, holds for many other sequences. We use these…
For a toy version of a quantum system with a conscious observer, it is demonstrated that the many-worlds problem is solved by retreating into the conscious subspace of an entire observer history. In every step of a discretised time, the…
We study the discrete variation of the classical cake-cutting problem where n players divide a 1-dimensional cake with exactly (n-1) cuts, replacing the continuous, infinitely divisible "cake" with a necklace of discrete, indivisible…
Dark patterns are interface designs that nudge users towards behavior that is against their best interests. Since humans are often not even aware that they are influenced by these malicious patterns, research has to identify ways to protect…
Magic numbers in finite particle systems correspond to specific system sizes that allow configurations with low free energy, often exhibiting closed surface shells to maximize the number of nearest neighbors. Since their discovery in atomic…
In this article we propose a probabilistic framework in order to study the fair division of a divisible good, e.g., a cake, between n players. Our framework follows the same idea than the ''Full independence model'' used in the study of…
In this article, we present a trick around Fibonacci numbers which can be found in several magic books. It consists in computing quickly the sum of the successive terms of a Fibonacci-like sequence. We give explanations and extensions of…
Conway Checkers is a game played with a checker placed in each square of the lower half of an infinite checkerboard. Pieces move by jumping over an adjacent checker, removing the checker jumped over. Conway showed that it is not possible to…
Consider a periodical (in two independent directions) tiling of the plane with polygons (faces). In this article we shall only give examples using squares, regular hexagons, equilateral triangles and parallelograms ("unions" of two…
In this note, we use a toy problem of detecting cycles of length two in a tent map to highlight some curious phenomena in the behavior of discrete dynamical systems. This work presents no new results or proofs, only computer experiments and…
A number of tricky problems in probability are discussed, having in common one or more infinite sequences of coin tosses, and a representation as a problem in dependent percolation. Three of these problems are of `Winkler' type, that is,…
The kissing number problem asks for the maximal number k(n) of equal size nonoverlapping spheres in n-dimensional space that can touch another sphere of the same size. This problem in dimension three was the subject of a famous discussion…
Pancake flipping, a famous open problem in computer science, can be formalised as the problem of sorting a permutation of positive integers using as few prefix reversals as possible. In that context, a prefix reversal of length k reverses…
Pebble games are popular models for analyzing time-space trade-offs. In particular, the reversible pebble game is often applied in quantum algorithms like Grover's search to efficiently simulate classical computation on inputs in…
The theoretical existence of Busy Beaver numbers provides a new notion for decidability and corresponding heuristic for conjectures. The minimum number of states in which a conjecture can be modeled gives a classification of what logic…