Related papers: On the Cookie Monster Problem

We define a set of restricted Reidemeister moves and show that if $K$ is obtained from $K_0\,\#\,K_1$ using those moves, then the crossing number of $K$ is at least $c(K_0)+c(K_1)$. We also explore topological interpretations of this…

This paper is about the Coupon collector's problem. There are some coupons, or baseball cards, or other plastic knick-knacks that are put into bags of chips or under soda bottles, etc. A collector starts collecting these trinkets and wants…

In a mass partition problem, we are interested in finding equitable partitions of smooth measures in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In this manuscript, we study the problem of finding simultaneous bisections of measures using scaled copies of a prescribed…

In formal languages and automata theory, the magic number problem can be formulated as follows: for a given integer n, is it possible to find a number d in the range [n,2^n] such that there is no minimal deterministic finite automaton with…

We consider a left-transient random walk in a random environment on Z that will be disturbed by cookies inducing a drift to the right of strength 1. The number of cookies per site is i.i.d. and independent of the environment. Criteria for…

We consider a class of self-interacting random walks in deterministic or random environments, known as excited random walks or cookie walks, on the d-dimensional integer lattice. The main purpose of this paper is two-fold: to give a survey…

We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…

We address the problem of fair division, or cake cutting, with the goal of finding truthful mechanisms. In the case of a general measure space ("cake") and non-atomic, additive individual preference measures - or utilities - we show that…

We study a game in which one keeps flipping a coin until a given finite string of heads and tails occurs. We find the expected number of coin flips to end the game when the ending string consists of at most four maximal runs of heads or…

What has so far prevented us from decrypting quantum mechanics is the Cookie Cutter Paradigm, according to which the world's synchronic multiplicity derives from surfaces that carve up space in the manner of three-dimensional cookie…

A full solution to the recently proposed problem of determining the probability that no $k$-gon can be built from $n$ independently and uniformly chosen sticks in $[0,1]$ is proposed. This extends the known results for triangles and…

A $k$-modal sequence is a sequence of real numbers that can be partitioned into $k+1$ (possibly empty) monotone sections such that adjacent sections have opposite monotonicities. For every positive integer $k$, we prove that any sequence of…

Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform…

The Rubik's Cube is the most popular puzzle in the world. Two of its studied aspects are God's Number, the minimum number of turns necessary to solve any state, and the first law of cubology, a solvability criterion. We modify previous…

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 responding to a question on Math Stackexchange, the author formulated the problem of determining the number of strings of balls colored in most $n$ colors with a number $k$ of repeated colors. In this paper, we formulate the problem more…

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…

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…

Every classical or virtual knot is equivalent to the unknot via a sequence of extended Reidemeister moves and the so-called forbidden moves. The minimum number of forbidden moves necessary to unknot a given knot is an invariant we call the…

For $k\geq 3$, a k-rollercoaster is a sequence of numbers whose every maximal contiguous subsequence, that is increasing or decreasing, has length at least $k$; $3$-rollercoasters are called simply rollercoasters. Given a sequence of…