Related papers: A brief overview of the sock matching problem
In this paper we study $k$-noncrossing matchings. A $k$-noncrossing matching is a labeled graph with vertex set $\{1,...,2n\}$ arranged in increasing order in a horizontal line and vertex-degree 1. The $n$ arcs are drawn in the upper…
Defant and Kravitz considered the following problem: Suppose that, to the right of a foot, there is a line of colored socks that needs to be sorted. However, at any point in time, one can only either place the leftmost sock to the right of…
We study pattern matching problems on two major representations of uncertain sequences used in molecular biology: weighted sequences (also known as position weight matrices, PWM) and profiles (i.e., scoring matrices). In the simple version,…
A family of subsets of $\{1,\ldots,n\}$ is called {\it intersecting} if any two of its sets intersect. A classical result in extremal combinatorics due to Erd\H{o}s, Ko, and Rado determines the maximum size of an intersecting family of…
We count the number of alignments of $N \ge 1$ sequences when match-up types are from a specified set $S\subseteq \mathbb{N}^N$. Equivalently, we count the number of nonnegative integer matrices whose rows sum to a given fixed vector and…
We introduce a new class of problems lying halfway between questions about graph capacity and intersection. We say that two binary sequences x and y of the same length have a skewincidence if there is a coordinate i for which x_i=y_{i+1}=1…
We consider some coloring issues related to the famous Erd\H {o}s Discrepancy Problem. A set of the form $A_{s,k}=\{s,2s,\dots,ks\}$, with $s,k\in \mathbb{N}$, is called a \emph{homogeneous arithmetic progression}. We prove that for every…
The following two decision problems capture the complexity of comparing integers or rationals that are succinctly represented in product-of-exponentials notation, or equivalently, via arithmetic circuits using only multiplication and…
For a fixed integer $k$, we define a sequence $A_k=(a_k(n))_{n\geq0}$ and a corresponding sparse subsequence $S_k$ using the cardinality of the $n$-th symmetric power of the set $\{1,2,\ldots, k\}$. For $k\in\{2,\dots,8\}$, we find…
In this paper, using properties of Ramanujan sums and of the discrete Fourier transform of arithmetic functions, we give an explicit formula for the number of solutions of the linear congruence $a_1x_1+\cdots +a_kx_k\equiv b \pmod{n}$, with…
A given subset $A$ of natural numbers is said to be complete if every element of $\mathbb{N}$ is the sum of distinct terms taken from $A$. This topic is strongly connected to the knapsack problem which is known to be NP complete.…
We investigate the problem of approximating the product $a^TBc$, where $a,c\in S^{n-1}$ and $B\in O_n$, in models of communication complexity and streaming algorithms. The worst meaningful approximation is to simply decide whether the…
String matching is the problem of deciding whether a given $n$-bit string contains a given $k$-bit pattern. We study the complexity of this problem in three settings. Communication complexity. For small $k$, we provide near-optimal upper…
Consider the problem of finding high dimensional approximate nearest neighbors, where the data is generated by some known probabilistic model. We will investigate a large natural class of algorithms which we call bucketing codes. We will…
The Bollob\'as set pairs inequality is a fundamental result in extremal set theory with many applications. In this paper, for $n \geq k \geq t \geq 2$, we consider a collection of $k$ families $\mathcal{A}_i: 1 \leq i \leq k$ where…
We define the min-min expectation selection problem (resp. max-min expectation selection problem) to be that of selecting k out of n given discrete probability distributions, to minimize (resp. maximize) the expectation of the minimum value…
The numbers we study in this paper are of the form $B_{n, p}(k)$, which is the number of binary words of length $n$ that contain the word $p$ (as a subsequence) exactly $k$ times. Our motivation comes from the analogous study of pattern…
We consider the system of equations $A_k(x)=p(x)A_{k-1}(x)(q(x)+\sum_{i=0}^k A_i(x))$ for $k\geq r+1$ where $A_i(x)$, $0\leq i \leq r$, are some given functions and show how to obtain a close form for $A(x)=\sum_{k\geq 0}A_k(x)$. We apply…
We derive lower and upper bounds on possible growth rates of certain sets of positive integers $A_k=\{1= a_1 < a_2 < ... < a_{k}\}$ such that all integers $n\in \{0, 1, 2, ..., ka_{k}\}$ can be represented as a sum of no more than $k$…
We define a set of binary matrices where any two of them can not be placed one on the other in a way such that the corresponding entries coincide. The rows of the matrices are obtained by means of Dyck words. The cardinality of the set of…