Related papers: The Probability Distribution for Draws Until First…
We introduce a variant of Shepp's classical urn problem in which the optimal stopper does not know whether sampling from the urn is done with or without replacement. By considering the problem's continuous-time analog, we provide bounds on…
Inspired by the Japanese game Pachinko, we study simple (perfectly "inelastic" collisions) dynamics of a unit ball falling amidst point obstacles (pins) in the plane. A classic example is that a checkerboard grid of pins produces the…
Binomial distributions capture the probabilities of `heads' outcomes when a (biased) coin is tossed multiple times. The coin may be identified with a distribution on the two-element set {0,1}, where the 1 outcome corresponds to `head'. One…
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…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
A classical P\'olya urn scheme is a Markov process whose evolution is encoded by a replacement matrix $(R_{i,j})_{1\leq i,j\leq d}$. At every discrete time-step, we draw a ball uniformly at random, denote its colour $c$, and replace it in…
A systematic study of the probability distribution of superimposed random codes is presented through the use of generating functions. Special attention is paid to the cases of either uniformly distributed but not necessarily independent or…
An infinite urn scheme is defined by a probability mass function $(p_j)_{j\geq1}$ over positive integers. A random allocation consists of a sample of $N$ independent drawings according to this probability distribution where $N$ may be…
Consider an urn containing balls labeled with integer values. Define a discrete-time random process by drawing two balls, one at a time and with replacement, and noting the labels. Add a new ball labeled with the sum of the two drawn…
What is the number of rolls of fair 6-sided dice until the first time the total sum of all rolls is a prime? We compute the expectation and the variance of this random variable up to an additive error of less than 10^{-4}. This is a…
In this paper we analyze the probability distributions associated with rolling (possibly unfair) dice infinitely often. Specifically, given a $q$-sided die, if $x_i\in\{0,\ldots,q-1\}$ denotes the outcome of the $i^{\text{th}}$ toss, then…
Goals for planning problems are typically conceived of as subsets of the state space. However, for many practical planning problems in robotics, we expect the robot to predict goals, e.g. from noisy sensors or by generalizing learned models…
Consider the following process whereby $n$ balls are distributed into $k$ bins. Repeatedly, a ball is removed from a non-empty bin chosen uniformly at random. The process ends when a single non-empty bin remains. Will Ma…
Suppose an urn contains initially any number of balls of two colours. One ball is drawn randomly and then put back with $\alpha$ balls of the same colour and $\beta$ balls of the opposite colour. Both cases, $\beta=0$ and $\beta>0$ are well…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
Consider two urns, $A$ and $B$, where initially $A$ contains a large number $n$ of balls and $B$ is empty. At each step, with equal probability, either we pick a ball at random in $A$ and place it in $B$, or vice-versa (provided of course…
In this work we show that the prime distribution is deterministic. Indeed the set of prime numbers P can be expressed in terms of two subsets of N using three specific selection rules, acting on two sets of prime candidates. The prime…
Assume that $2n$ balls are thrown independently and uniformly at random into $n$ bins. We consider the unlikely event $E$ that every bin receives at least one ball, showing that $\Pr[E] = \Theta(b^n)$ where $b \approx 0.836$. Note that, due…
The ranking and selection problem is a popular framework in the simulation literature for studying optimal information collection. We study a version of this problem in which the simulation output for each design is normally distributed…
We study sorting of permutations by random swaps if each comparison gives the wrong result with some fixed probability $p<1/2$. We use this process as prototype for the behaviour of randomized, comparison-based optimization heuristics in…