Related papers: A brief overview of the sock matching problem
Let S_n=X_1+...+X_n be a sum of independent symmetric random variables such that |X_{i}|\leq 1. Denote by W_n=\epsilon_{1}+...+\epsilon_{n} a sum of independent random variables such that \prob{\eps_i = \pm 1} = 1/2. We prove that…
Consider the linear congruence equation $${a_1^{s}x_1+\ldots+a_k^{s} x_k \equiv b\,(\text{mod } n^s)}\text { where } a_i,b\in\mathbb{Z},s\in\mathbb{N}$$ Denote by $(a,b)_s$ the largest $l^s\in\mathbb{N}$ which divides $a$ and $b$…
The theme of this article is a "reciprocity" between bounded up-down paths and bounded alternating sequences. Roughly speaking, this ``reciprocity" manifests itself by the fact that the extension of the sequence of numbers of paths of…
An ordered matching of size $n$ is a graph on a linearly ordered vertex set $V$, $|V|=2n$, consisting of $n$ pairwise disjoint edges. There are three different ordered matchings of size two on $V=\{1,2,3,4\}$: an alignment…
We consider the problem of sequencing a set of positive numbers. We try to find the optimal sequence to maximize the variance of its partial sums. The optimal sequence is shown to have a beautiful structure. It is interesting to note that…
The subgraph-subgraph matching problem is, given a pair of graphs and a positive integer $K$, to find $K$ vertices in the first graph, $K$ vertices in the second graph, and a bijection between them, so as to minimize the number of adjacency…
A perfect matching M in an edge-colored complete bipartite graph K_{n,n} is rainbow if no pair of edges in M have the same color. We obtain asymptotic enumeration results for the number of rainbow matchings in terms of the maximum number of…
Balls-in-bins models describe a random sequential allocation of infinitely many balls into a finite number of bins. In these models a ball is placed into a bin with probability proportional to a given function (feedback function), which…
The bin packing problem is to find the minimum number of bins of size one to pack a list of items with sizes $a_1,..., a_n$ in $(0,1]$. Using uniform sampling, which selects a random element from the input list each time, we develop a…
Let $n = b_1 + ... + b_k = b_1' + \cdot + b_k'$ be a pair of compositions of $n$ into $k$ positive parts. We say this pair is {\em irreducible} if there is no positive $j < k$ for which $b_1 + ... b_j = b_1' + ... b_j'$. The probability…
The classic string indexing problem is to preprocess a string $S$ into a compact data structure that supports efficient subsequent pattern matching queries, that is, given a pattern string $P$, report all occurrences of $P$ within $S$. In…
We consider an extension of the {\em popular matching} problem in this paper. The input to the popular matching problem is a bipartite graph G = (A U B,E), where A is a set of people, B is a set of items, and each person a belonging to A…
On an $r\times (n-r)$ lattice rectangle, we first consider walks that begin at the SW corner, proceed with unit steps in either of the directions E or N, and terminate at the NE corner of the rectangle. For each integer $k$ we ask for…
We study the inapproximability of the induced disjoint paths problem on an arbitrary $n$-node $m$-edge undirected graph, which is to connect the maximum number of the $k$ source-sink pairs given in the graph via induced disjoint paths. It…
We study the problem of finding solutions to the stable matching problem that are robust to errors in the input and we obtain a polynomial time algorithm for a special class of errors. In the process, we also initiate work on a new…
We solve multiple conjectures by Byszewski and Ulas about the sum of base $b$ digits function. In order to do this, we develop general results about summations over the sum of digits function. As a corollary, we describe an unexpected new…
We study the number of queries needed to identify a monotone Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}$. A query consists of a 0-1-sequence, and the answer is the value of $f$ on that sequence. It is well-known that the number of…
This paper examines the classical matching distribution arising in the "problem of coincidences". We generalise the classical matching distribution with a preliminary round of allocation where items are correctly matched with some fixed…
Recently, many studies have been devoted to finding diverse solutions in classical combinatorial problems, such as Vertex Cover (Baste et al., IJCAI'20), Matching (Fomin et al., ISAAC'20) and Spanning Tree (Hanaka et al., AAAI'21). We…
Finding the underlying probability distributions of a set of observed sequences under the constraint that each sequence is generated i.i.d by a distinct distribution is considered. The number of distributions, and hence the number of…