Related papers: Too Many Hats
In "Recognizing the Maximum of a Sequence", Gilbert and Mosteller analyze a full information game where n measurements from an uniform distribution are drawn and a player (knowing n) must decide at each draw whether or not to choose that…
We use machine learning to provide a tractable measure of the amount of predictable variation in the data that a theory captures, which we call its "completeness." We apply this measure to three problems: assigning certain equivalents to…
The network coloring game has been proposed in the literature of social sciences as a model for conflict-resolution circumstances. The players of the game are the vertices of a graph with $n$ vertices and maximum degree $\Delta$. The game…
In a recent article in American Scientist, Theodore Hill described a coin-tossing game whose pay-off is the number of heads over the total number of throws. Suppose that at a given point during the game you have 5 heads and 3 tails, should…
This paper studies the deviations of the regret in a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. When the total number of plays n is known beforehand by the agent, Audibert et al. (2009) exhibit a policy such that with probability at least…
In the picture-hanging puzzle we are to hang a picture so that the string loops around $n$ nails and the removal of any nail results in a fall of the picture. We show that the length of a sequence representing an element in the free group…
Suppose $N$ independent Bernoulli trials are observed sequentially at random times of a mixed binomial process. The task is to maximise, by using a nonanticipating stopping strategy, the probability of stopping at the last success. We focus…
When we test a theory using data, it is common to focus on correctness: do the predictions of the theory match what we see in the data? But we also care about completeness: how much of the predictable variation in the data is captured by…
A simple method to produce a random order type is to take the order type of a random point set. We conjecture that many probability distributions on order types defined in this way are heavily concentrated and therefore sample inefficiently…
We study the problem of counting the number of {\em isomorphic} copies of a given {\em template} graph, say $H$, in the input {\em base} graph, say $G$. In general, it is believed that polynomial time algorithms that solve this problem…
We study heterogeneous $k$-facility location games. In this model there are $k$ facilities where each facility serves a different purpose. Thus, the preferences of the agents over the facilities can vary arbitrarily. Our goal is to design…
A hole in a graph is an induced cycle of length at least 4. We give a simple winning strategy for t-3 cops to capture a robber in the game of cops and robbers played in a graph that does not contain a hole of length at least t. This…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
We show that for any n divisible by 3, almost all order-n Steiner triple systems have a perfect matching (also known as a parallel class or resolution class). In fact, we prove a general upper bound on the number of perfect matchings in a…
We consider the connected variant of the classic mixed search game where, in each search step, cleaned edges form a connected subgraph. We consider graph classes with bounded connected (and monotone) mixed search number and we deal with the…
We study the problem of resilient strategies in the presence of uncertainty. Resilient strategies enable an agent to make decisions that are robust against disturbances. In particular, we are interested in those disturbances that are able…
We study the maximization version of the fundamental graph coloring problem. Here the goal is to color the vertices of a k-colorable graph with k colors so that a maximum fraction of edges are properly colored (i.e. their endpoints receive…
In this paper the results of a simulation of a prisoner's dilemma robin-round tournament are presented. In the tournament each participating strategy plays an iterated prisoner's dilemma against each other strategy (round-robin) and as a…
An unknown positive number of items arrive at independent uniformly distributed times in the interval [0,1] to a selector, whose task is to pick online the last one. We show that under the assumption of an adversary determining the number…
The game of best choice (or "secretary problem") is a model for making an irrevocable decision among a fixed number of candidate choices that are presented sequentially in random order, one at a time. Because the classically optimal…