Related papers: Cookie Monster Devours Naccis
We show the details of certain computations that are used in the paper "Verification of the conjugacy classes and ordinary character table of the Monster".
The study examines the relationship between Ball's magic numbers and reverses divisors. These numbers are the source of beautiful and curious properties. Activities related to numbers can be a fun way to motivate mathematics students, while…
One of the most popular and studied recursive series is the Fibonacci sequence. It is challenging to see how Fibonacci numbers can be used to generate other recursive sequences. In our article, we describe some families of integer…
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…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
In this paper, we consider several combinatorial problems whose enumeration leads to the odd-indexed Fibonacci numbers, including certain types of Dyck paths, block fountains, directed column-convex polyominoes, and set partitions with no…
This paper studies the idea of ``deception by motion'' through a two-player dynamic game played between a Mover who must retrieve resources at a goal location, and an Eater who can consume resources at two candidate goals. The Mover seeks…
How many moves does it take to solve Rubik's Cube? Positions are known that require 20 moves, and it has already been shown that there are no positions that require 27 or more moves; this is a surprisingly large gap. This paper describes a…
We consider a random walk on integers where at the first visits to a site the walker gets a positive drift, but where after a certain number of visits the walker gets a negative drift. We prove that the walker is almost surely transient to…
Based on the combinatorial interpretation of the ordered Bell numbers, which count all the ordered partitions of the set $[n]=\{1,2,\dots,n\}$, we introduce the Fibonacci partition as a Fibonacci permutation of its blocks. Then we define…
The Fibonacci numbers satisfy the famous recurrence $F_n = F_{n - 1} + F_{n - 2}$. The theory of C-finite sequences ensures that the Fibonacci numbers whose indices are divisible by $m$, namely $F_{mn}$, satisfy a similar recurrence for…
The Maker-Breaker domination game is played on a graph $G$ by Dominator and Staller. The players alternatively select a vertex of $G$ that was not yet chosen in the course of the game. Dominator wins if at some point the vertices he has…
We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…
Lights Out is a single-player electronic handheld game from the 1990s that features a 5 by 5 grid of light-up buttons. The game begins with some lights on and others off. The goal is to turn off all lights but pressing a button changes its…
The muffin problem asks us to divide $m$ muffins into pieces and assign each of those pieces to one of $s$ students so that the sizes of the pieces assigned to each student total $m/s$, with the objective being to maximize the size of the…
Let $F_1=1,F_2=1,\ldots$ be the Fibonacci sequence. Motivated by the identity $\displaystyle\sum_{k=0}^{\infty}\frac{1}{F_{2^k}}=\frac{7-\sqrt{5}}{2}$, Erd\"os and Graham asked whether $\displaystyle\sum_{k=1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{F_{n_k}}$ is…
We consider a random walk in an i.i.d. random environment on Z that is perturbed by cookies of strength 1. The number of cookies per site is assumed to be i.i.d. Results on the speed of the random walk are obtained. Our main tool is the…
In response to the ePrivacy Directive and the consent requirements introduced by the GDPR, websites began deploying consent banners to obtain user permission for data collection and processing. However, due to shared third-party services…
We will study an open problem pertaining to the uniqueness of minimizers for a class of variational problems emanating from Meyer's model for the decomposition of an image into a geometric part and a texture part. Mainly, we are interested…
Let $\mathsf{A}=\{a_1,\dots,a_m\}$, $m\in\mathbb{N}$, be measurable functions on a measurable space $(\mathcal{X},\mathfrak{A})$. If $\mu$ is a positive measure on $(\mathcal{X},\mathfrak{A})$ such that $\int a_i d\mu<\infty$ for all $i$,…