Related papers: Weighing the "Heaviest" Polya Urn
We study the problem of coalitional manipulation---where $k$ manipulators try to manipulate an election on $m$ candidates---under general scoring rules, with a focus on the Borda protocol. We do so both in the weighted and unweighted…
We give an asymptotic approximation scheme (APTAS) for the problem of packing a set of circles into a minimum number of unit square bins. To obtain rational solutions, we use augmented bins of height $1+\gamma$, for some arbitrarily small…
Given $n$ colored balls, we want to detect if more than $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$ of them have the same color, and if so find one ball with such majority color. We are only allowed to choose two balls and compare their colors, and the goal is to…
A certain sampling process, concerning an urn with balls of two colors, proposed in 1965 by B.E. Oakley and R.L. Perry, and discussed by Peter Winkler and Martin Gardner, that has an extremely simple answer for the probability, namely the…
We study integer programming instances over polytopes P(A,b)={x:Ax<=b} where the constraint matrix A is random, i.e., its entries are i.i.d. Gaussian or, more generally, its rows are i.i.d. from a spherically symmetric distribution. The…
A basic experiment in probability theory is drawing without replacement from an urn filled with multiple balls of different colours. Clearly, it is physically impossible to overdraw, that is, to draw more balls from the urn than it…
At large quantum numbers, the probability densities for particle-in-a-box or simple harmonic oscillator converge to the classical result upon coarse-graining the quantum mechanical probability densities by introducing a finite resolution in…
We give a lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt n)$ on the unambiguous randomised parity-query complexity of the approximate majority problem -- that is, on the lowest randomised parity-query complexity of any function over $\{0,1\}^n$ whose value…
We study the joint asymptotics of forward and backward processes of numbers of non-empty urns in an infinite urn scheme. The probabilities of balls hitting the urns are assumed to satisfy the conditions of regular decrease. We prove weak…
The method, proposed in \cite{Za22} to derive the densest packing fraction of random disc and sphere packings, is shown to yield in two dimensions too high a value that (i) violates the very assumption underlying the method and (ii)…
The celebrated Dvoretzky theorem asserts that every $N$-dimensional convex body admits central sections of dimension $d = \Omega(\log N)$, which is nearly spherical. For many instances of convex bodies, typically unit balls with respect to…
We study an urn model introduced in the paper of Chen and Wei, where at each discrete time step $m$ balls are drawn at random from the urn containing colors white and black. Balls are added to the urn according to the inspected colors,…
We propose an approach to analyze the asymptotic behavior of P\'olya urns based on the contraction method. For this, a new combinatorial discrete time embedding of the evolution of the urn into random rooted trees is developed. A…
An urn contains balls of d colors. At each time, a ball is drawn and then replaced together with a random number of balls of the same color. Assuming that some colors are dominated by others, we prove central limit theorems. Some…
Let $\xi$ be a real random variable with mean zero and variance one and $A={a_1,...,a_n}$ be a multi-set in $\R^d$. The random sum $$S_A := a_1 \xi_1 + ... + a_n \xi_n $$ where $\xi_i$ are iid copies of $\xi$ is of fundamental importance in…
Consider sequential packing of unit balls in a large cube, as in the Renyi car-parking model, but in any dimension and with Poisson input. We show after suitable rescaling that the spatial distribution of packed balls tends to that of a…
Motivated by the common academic problem of allocating papers to referees for conference reviewing we propose a novel mechanism for solving the assignment problem when we have a two sided matching problem with preferences from one side (the…
Given a set of n balls each colored with a color, a ball is said to be majority, k-majority, plurality if its color class has size larger than half of the number of balls, has size at least k, has size larger than any other color class;…
A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…
We study a new class of time inhomogeneous P\'olya-type urn schemes and give optimal rates of convergence for the distribution of the properly scaled number of balls of a given color to nearly the full class of generalized gamma…