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We consider the problem of enumeration of incongruent two-color bracelets of $n$ beads, $k$ of which are black, and study several natural variations of this problem. We also give recursion formulas for enumeration of $t$-color bracelets,…
The paper presents complexity results and performance guaranties for a family of approximation algorithms for an optimisation problem arising in software testing and manufacturing. The problem is formulated as a partitioning of a set where…
In this paper, we use techniques of enumerative combinatorics to study the following problem: we count the number of ways to split $n$ balls into nonempty, ordered bins so that the most crowded bin has exactly $k$ balls. We find closed…
We generalize the well-known Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) in combinatorics. Our problem is to find the minimum and expected number of draws, with replacement, required to recover $n$ distinctly labeled coupons, with each draw consisting…
We consider weighted tiling systems to represent functions from graphs to a commutative semiring such as the Natural semiring or the Tropical semiring. The system labels the nodes of a graph by its states, and checks if the neighbourhood of…
A number of tricky problems in probability are discussed, having in common one or more infinite sequences of coin tosses, and a representation as a problem in dependent percolation. Three of these problems are of `Winkler' type, that is,…
An ordered triple $(s,p,n)$ is called admissible if there exist two different multisets $X=\{x_1,x_2,\dotsc,x_n\}$ and $Y=\{y_1,y_2,\dotsc,y_n\}$ such that $X$ and $Y$ share the same sum $s$, the same product $p$, and the same size $n$. We…
In this talk we review results from studies with unconventional many hadron systems containing mesons: systems with two mesons and one baryon, three mesons, some novel systems with two baryons and one meson, and finally systems with many…
Many combinatorial optimization problems can be formulated as the search for a subgraph that satisfies certain properties and minimizes the total weight. We assume here that the vertices correspond to points in a metric space and can take…
The work in this paper is to initiate a theory of testing monomials in multivariate polynomials. The central question is to ask whether a polynomial represented by certain economically compact structure has a multilinear monomial in its…
While the Ising model remains essential to understand physical phenomena, its natural connection to combinatorial reasoning makes it also one of the best models to probe complex systems in science and engineering. We bring a computational…
Suppose that the edges of a complete graph are assigned weights independently at random and we ask for the weight of the minimal-weight spanning tree, or perfect matching, or Hamiltonian cycle. For these and several other common…
In Gert Almkvist's beautiful article, entitled "Invariants, mostly old ones", (that appeared in the Pacific Journal of Mathematics, vol. 86 (1980), pp. 1-13) he talked about a sequence of generating functions that came up in his work, that…
We study a hypothesis testing problem in which data is compressed distributively and sent to a detector that seeks to decide between two possible distributions for the data. The aim is to characterize all achievable encoding rates and…
We consider several extensions of the fractional bin packing problem, a relaxation of the traditional bin packing problem where the objects may be split across multiple bins. In these extensions, we introduce load-balancing constraints…
Randomisation is a critical tool in designing distributed systems. The common coin primitive, enabling the system members to agree on an unpredictable random number, has proven to be particularly useful. We observe, however, that it is…
We study the problem of deciding if a given triple of permutations can be realized as geometric permutations of disjoint convex sets in $\mathbb{R}^3$. We show that this question, which is equivalent to deciding the emptiness of certain…
The subset sum algorithm is a natural heuristic for the classical Bin Packing problem: In each iteration, the algorithm finds among the unpacked items, a maximum size set of items that fits into a new bin. More than 35 years after its first…
Many combinatorial problems can be formulated as "Can I transform configuration 1 into configuration 2, if certain transformations only are allowed?". An example of such a question is: given two k-colourings of a graph, can I transform the…
We define the parametric closure problem, in which the input is a partially ordered set whose elements have linearly varying weights and the goal is to compute the sequence of minimum-weight lower sets of the partial order as the weights…