Related papers: Revisiting the Majority Problem: Average-Case Anal…
We study a \emph{Plurality-Consensus} process in which each of $n$ anonymous agents of a communication network initially supports an opinion (a color chosen from a finite set $[k]$). Then, in every (synchronous) round, each agent can revise…
The problem of determining the number of "flooding operations" required to make a given coloured graph monochromatic in the one-player combinatorial game Flood-It has been studied extensively from an algorithmic point of view, but basic…
Graph coloring is a fundamental problem in computer science. In the semi-streaming model, an input graph $G$ on $n$ vertices and maximum degree $\Delta$ is presented as a stream of edges, and the goal is to compute a vertex coloring using a…
In the first part of this paper, we consider weighted domination in the case where the vertices of the complete graph on~\(n\) vertices are equipped with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) weights. We use the probabilistic…
The task of learning to pick a single preferred example out a finite set of examples, an "optimal choice problem", is a supervised machine learning problem with complex, structured input. Problems of optimal choice emerge often in various…
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in solving various graph coloring problems in the streaming model. The initial algorithms in this line of work are all crucially randomized, raising natural questions about how important a…
Set-coloring a graph means giving each vertex a subset of a fixed color set so that no two adjacent subsets have the same cardinality. When the graph is complete one gets a new distribution problem with an interesting generating function.…
We give a characterization of finite sets of triples of elements (e.g., positive integers) that can be colored with two colors such that for every element $i$ in each color class there exists a triple which does not contain $i$. We give a…
We consider training probabilistic classifiers in the case of a large number of classes. The number of classes is assumed too large to perform exact normalisation over all classes. To account for this we consider a simple approach that…
Although the halting problem is undecidable, imperfect testers that fail on some instances are possible. Such instances are called hard for the tester. One variant of imperfect testers replies "I don't know" on hard instances, another…
This paper revisits a fundamental distributed computing problem in the population protocol model. Provided $n$ agents each starting with an input color in $[k]$, the relative majority problem asks to find the predominant color. In the…
A {\bf $\mathbf{k}$-majority coloring} of a digraph $D=(V,A)$ is a coloring of $V$ with $k$ colors so that each vertex $v\in V$ has at least as many out-neighbours of color different from its own color as it has out-neighbours with the same…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
This paper studies Ebert's hat problem with four players and two colors, where the probabilities of the colors may be different for each player. Our goal is to maximize the probability of winning the game and to describe winning strategies…
We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…
A brief review is given of the minority game, an idealized model stimulated by a market of speculative agents, and its complex many-body behaviour. Particular consideration is given to analytic results for the model rather than discussions…
We consider a generalization of the classical 100 Prisoner problem and its variant, involving empty boxes, whereby winning probabilities for a team depend on the number of attempts, as well as on the number of winners. We call this the…
Majorisation, also called rearrangement inequalities, yields a type of stochastic ordering in which two or more distributions can be compared. In this paper we argue that majorisation is a good candidate as a theory for uncertainty. We…
This paper studies Ebert's hat problem for three and four players and two colors, where the probabilities of the colors may be different for each player. Our goal is to maximize the probability of winning the game and to describe winning…
Many practical problems in almost all scientific and technological disciplines have been classified as computationally hard (NP-hard or even NP-complete). In life sciences, combinatorial optimization problems frequently arise in molecular…