Related papers: Majority problems of large query size

Given a set of n balls each colored with a color, a ball is said to be majority, k-majority, plurality if its color class has size larger than half of the number of balls, has size at least k, has size larger than any other color class;…

We are given $n$ balls and an unknown coloring of them with two colors. Our goal is to find a ball that belongs to the larger color class, or show that the color classes have the same size. We can ask sets of $k$ balls as queries, and the…

Consider a bin containing $n$ balls colored with two colors. In a $k$-query, $k$ balls are selected by a questioner and the oracle's reply is related (depending on the computation model being considered) to the distribution of colors of the…

The Plurality problem - introduced by Aigner \cite{A2004} - has many variants. In this article we deal with the following version: suppose we are given $n$ balls, each of them colored by one of three colors. A \textit{plurality ball} is one…

The problem we are considering is the following. A colorblind player is given a set $B = \{b_1,b_2,...,b_N\}$ of $N$ colored balls. He knows that each ball is colored either red or green, and that there are less green balls (this will be…

Given a set of $n$ colored balls, a \textit{majority, non-minority or plurality ball} is one whose color class has size more than $n/2$, at least $n/2$ or larger than any other color class, respectively. We describe linear time algorithms…

The $k$-majority game is played with $n$ numbered balls, each coloured with one of two colours. It is given that there are at least $k$ balls of the majority colour, where $k$ is a fixed integer greater than $n/2$. On each turn the player…

The majority problem is a special case of the heavy hitters problem. Given a collection of coloured balls, the task is to identify the majority colour or state that no such colour exists. Whilst the special case of two-colours has been well…

Suppose we are given a set of $n$ balls $\{b_1,\ldots,b_n\}$ each colored either red or blue in some way unknown to us. To find out some information about the colors, we can query any triple of balls $\{b_{i_1},b_{i_2},b_{i_3}\}$. As an…

In responding to a question on Math Stackexchange, the author formulated the problem of determining the number of strings of balls colored in most $n$ colors with a number $k$ of repeated colors. In this paper, we formulate the problem more…

We show how to select an item with the majority color from $n$ two-colored items, given access to the items only through an oracle that returns the discrepancy of subsets of $k$ items. We use $n/\lfloor\tfrac{k}{2}\rfloor+O(k)$ queries,…

Given $n$ colored balls, we want to detect if more than $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$ of them have the same color, and if so find one ball with such majority color. We are only allowed to choose two balls and compare their colors, and the goal is to…

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.…

Suppose that the vertices of a graph $G$ are colored with two colors in an unknown way. The color that occurs on more than half of the vertices is called the majority color (if it exists), and any vertex of this color is called a majority…

The purpose of this note is to draw attention to problems related to a concept called majority colouring recently studied by Kreutzer, Oum, Seymour, van der Zypen and Wood. They raised a problem of determining, for a natural number $k$, the…

An urn contains balls of d colors. At each time, a ball is drawn and then replaced together with a random number of balls of the same color. Assuming that some colors are dominated by others, we prove central limit theorems. Some…

We study a P\'olya-type urn model defined as follows. Start at time 0 with a single ball of some colour. Then, at each time n>0, choose a ball from the urn uniformly at random. With probability 1/2<p<1, return the ball to the urn along with…

Enumeration problems aim at outputting, without repetition, the set of solutions to a given problem instance. However, outputting the entire solution set may be prohibitively expensive if it is too big. In this case, outputting a small,…

Since the 1960s Mastermind has been studied for the combinatorial and information theoretical interest the game has to offer. Many results have been discovered starting with Erd\H{o}s and R\'enyi determining the optimal number of queries…

We consider the discrepancy problem of coloring $n$ intervals with $k$ colors such that at each point on the line, the maximal difference between the number of intervals of any two colors is minimal. Somewhat surprisingly, a coloring with…