Related papers: God Save the Queen
The Gale-Shapley algorithm for the Stable Marriage Problem is known to take $\Theta(n^2)$ steps to find a stable marriage in the worst case, but only $\Theta(n \log n)$ steps in the average case (with $n$ women and $n$ men). In 1976, Knuth…
The Lonely Runner Conjecture asserts that if $n$ runners with distinct constant speeds run on the unit circle $\mathbb{R}/\mathbb{Z}$ starting from $0$ at time $0$, then each runner will at some time $t>0$ be lonely in the sense that she/he…
Although cooperation is central to the organisation of many social systems, relatively little is known about cooperation in situations of collective emergency. When groups of people flee from a danger such as a burning building or a…
We improve the solution of the classical prisoners and drawers riddle, where all prisoners can find their number using the pointer-following strategy, provided that the prisoners can send a spy to inspect all drawers and swap one pair of…
A particle in the H\'enon-Heiles potential can escape when its energy is above the threshold value $E_{th}={1/6}$. We report a theoretical study on the the escape rates near threshold. We derived an analytic formula for the escape rate as a…
A mobile agent equipped with a compass and a measure of length has to find an inert treasure in the Euclidean plane. Both the agent and the treasure are modeled as points. In the beginning, the agent is at a distance at most $D>0$ from the…
Collective behavior of people in large groups and emergent crowd dynamics can have dangerous and disastrous results when panic is introduced. These events can be caused by emergency situations such as fires in a large building or a…
Consider a model of fire spreading through a graph; initially some vertices are burning, and at every given time-step fire spreads from burning vertices to their neighbours. The firefighter problem is a solitaire game in which a player is…
Major challenges of assisting passengers to safely and quickly escape from ships when an emergency occurs, include complex realistic features such as human behavior uncertainty, dynamic human traversal times, and the computation and…
This paper investigates a pursuit-evasion problem involving three agents: a pursuer, an evader, and a defender. Cooperative guidance laws are developed for the evader-defender team that guarantee interception of the pursuer by the defender…
Number the cells of a (possibly infinite) chessboard in some way with the numbers 0, 1, 2, ... Consider the cells in order, placing a queen in a cell if and only if it would not attack any earlier queen. The problem is to determine the…
We use a basic setup of two coupled exclusion processes to model a stylised situation in evacuation dynamics, in which evacuees have to choose between two escape routes. The coupling between the two processes occurs through one common point…
This paper investigates a partial-information pursuit evasion game in which the Pursuer has a limited-range sensor to detect the Evader. Given a fixed final time, we derive the optimal evasion strategy for the Evader to maximize its…
We consider the one-dimensional target search process that involves an immobile target located at the origin and $N$ searchers performing independent Brownian motions starting at the initial positions $\vec x = (x_1,x_2,..., x_N)$ all on…
We consider multidimensional random walks in pyramids, which by definition are cones formed by finite intersections of half-spaces. The main object of interest is the survival probability $\mathbb{P}(\tau>n)$, $\tau$ denoting the first exit…
The firefighter problem is a monotone dynamic process in graphs that can be viewed as modeling the use of a limited supply of vaccinations to stop the spread of an epidemic. In more detail, a fire spreads through a graph, from burning…
A defender dispatches patrollers to circumambulate a perimeter to guard against potential attacks. The defender decides on the time points to dispatch patrollers and each patroller's direction and speed, as long as the long-run rate…
We consider the following game played in the Euclidean plane: There is any countable set of unit speed lions and one fast man who can run with speed $1+\varepsilon$ for some value $\varepsilon>0$. Can the man survive? We answer the question…
1.3 million household fires, 3,400 civilian deaths, and 23 billion dollars in damage, a fire department is called to respond every 24 seconds. Many firefighters are injured during search and rescue operations due to hidden dangers.…
Timely evacuation is crucial to disaster response, as people can avoid suffering and loss of lives when a major disaster happens. With the development of sharing economy, ridesharing has the advantage of reducing congestion, saving travel…