Related papers: Collecting Coupons with Random Initial Stake
This paper is an attempt to remedy the problem of slow convergence for first-order numerical algorithms by proposing an adaptive conditioning heuristic. First, we propose a parallelizable numerical algorithm that is capable of solving…
In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number $n$ of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with…
We consider the problem of optimal planning in stochastic domains with resource constraints, where the resources are continuous and the choice of action at each step depends on resource availability. We introduce the HAO* algorithm, a…
In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…
We provide a simple new randomized contraction approach to the global minimum cut problem for simple undirected graphs. The contractions exploit 2-out edge sampling from each vertex rather than the standard uniform edge sampling. We…
Many discrete-time optimal stopping problems are known to have more tractable limit forms based on a planar Poisson process. Using this tool we find a solution to the optimal stopping problem for i.i.d. sequence of $n$ discrete uniform…
In this paper, we study the following detection problem. There are $n$ detectors randomly placed in the unit square $S = \left[-\frac{1}{2},\frac{1}{2}\right]^2$ assigned to detect the presence of a source located at the origin. Time is…
The traveling tournament problem (TTP) is to minimize the total traveling distance of all teams in a double round-robin tournament. In this paper, we focus on TTP-2, in which each team plays at most two consecutive home games and at most…
We initiate the work on maximin share (MMS) fair allocation of m indivisible chores to n agents using only their ordinal preferences, from both algorithmic and mechanism design perspectives. The previous best-known approximation is 2-1/n by…
The semi-random graph process is an adaptive random graph process in which an online algorithm is initially presented an empty graph on $n$ vertices. In each round, a vertex $u$ is presented to the algorithm independently and uniformly at…
The best known lower and upper bounds on the mixing time for the random-to-random insertions shuffle are $(1/2-o(1))n\log n$ and $(2+o(1))n\log n$. A long standing open problem is to prove that the mixing time exhibits a cutoff. In…
We consider a random walker on a ring, subjected to resetting at Poisson-distributed times to the initial position (the walker takes the shortest path along the ring to the initial position at resetting times). In the case of a Brownian…
Consider a set $P$ of $n$ points picked uniformly and independently from $[0,1]^d$ for a constant dimension $d$ -- such a point set is extremely well behaved in many aspects. For example, for a fixed $r \in [0,1]$, we prove a new…
We address the problem of computing the distribution of induced connected subgraphs, aka \emph{graphlets} or \emph{motifs}, in large graphs. The current state-of-the-art algorithms estimate the motif counts via uniform sampling, by…
In this paper, we consider the problem of choosing a minimum cost set of resources for executing a specified set of jobs. Each input job is an interval, determined by its start-time and end-time. Each resource is also an interval determined…
A random search is a stochastic process representing the random motion of a particle (denoted as the searcher) that is terminated when it reaches (detects) a target particle or area the first time. In intermittent search the random motion…
In a multiple-object auction, every bidder tries to win as many objects as possible with a bidding algorithm. This paper studies position-randomized auctions, which form a special class of multiple-object auctions where a bidding algorithm…
We present a dependent randomized rounding scheme, which rounds fractional solutions to integral solutions satisfying certain hard constraints on the output while preserving Chernoff-like concentration properties. In contrast to previous…
We study the win rate $R_{N_d}/N_d$ of a biased simple random walk $S_n$ on $\mathbb{Z}$ at the first-passage time $N_d=\inf\{n\ge 0:S_n=d\}$, with $p=P[X_1=+1]\in[1/2,1)$. Using generating-function techniques and integral representations,…
We initiate a study of locally decodable codes with randomized encoding. Standard locally decodable codes are error correcting codes with a deterministic encoding function and a randomized decoding function, such that any desired message…