Related papers: Too Many Hats
We introduce the game of Cat Herding, where an omnipresent herder slowly cuts down a graph until an evasive cat player has nowhere to go. The number of cuts made is the score of a game, and we study the score under optimal play. In this…
We study a variant of the parallel Moser-Tardos Algorithm. We prove that if we restrict attention to a class of problems whose dependency graphs have subexponential growth, then the expected total number of random bits used by the algorithm…
A graph $G$ is said to be perfectly divisible if for every induced subgraph $H$ of $G$ with at least one edge, the vertex set $V(H)$ can be partitioned into two sets $A, B$ such that $H[A]$ is perfect and $\omega(B) < \omega(H)$. It is easy…
We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Given a value $p\in(0{,}1)\setminus\{\frac12\}$, the riffle shuffle is assumed to be…
Given a fixed graph $H$ and a positive integer $n$, a Picker-Chooser $H$-game is a biased game played on the edge set of $K_n$ in which Picker is trying to force many copies of $H$ and Chooser is trying to prevent him from doing so. In this…
We consider the problem of determining the minimum number of moves needed to solve a certain one-dimensional peg puzzle. Let N be a positive integer. The puzzle apparatus consists of a block with a single row of 2N+1 equally spaced holes…
In how many ways can $n$ queens be placed on an $n \times n$ chessboard so that no two queens attack each other? This is the famous $n$-queens problem. Let $Q(n)$ denote the number of such configurations, and let $T(n)$ be the number of…
We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…
Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma(IPD) is a well-known benchmark for studying the long term behaviors of rational agents, such as how cooperation can emerge among selfish and unrelated agents that need to co-exist over long term. Many well-known…
Hadwiger Conjecture has been an open problem for over a half century1,6, which says that there is at most a complete graph Kt but no Kt+1 for every t-colorable graph. A few cases of Hadwiger Conjecture, such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-colorable…
Characterizing graphs by their spectra is a fundamental and challenging problem in spectral graph theory, which has received considerable attention in recent years. A major unsolved conjecture in this area is Haemers' conjecture which…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck.…
We present a new algorithm for exactly solving decision making problems represented as influence diagrams. We do not require the usual assumptions of no forgetting and regularity; this allows us to solve problems with simultaneous decisions…
As machine learning agents act more autonomously in the world, they will increasingly interact with each other. Unfortunately, in many social dilemmas like the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma, standard game theory predicts that ML agents will…
In 2024, Daniel Litt posed a simple coinflip game pitting Alice's "Heads-Heads" vs Bob's "Heads-Tails": who is more likely to win if they score 1 point per occurrence of their substring in a sequence of n fair coinflips? This attracted over…
Let $\mathcal{C}_k(n)$ be the family of all connected $k$-chromatic graphs of order $n$. Given a natural number $x\geq k$, we consider the problem of finding the maximum number of $x$-colorings among graphs in $\mathcal{C}_k(n)$. When…
The multi-armed bandit is a mathematical interpretation of the problem a gambler faces when confronted with a number of different machines (bandits). The gambler wants to explore different machines to discover which machine offers the best…
Individual choices are either based on personal experience or on information provided by peers. The latter case, causes individuals to conform to the majority in their neighborhood. Such herding behavior may be very efficient in aggregating…
Collective or group intelligence is manifested in the fact that a team of cooperating agents can solve problems more efficiently than when those agents work in isolation. Although cooperation is, in general, a successful problem solving…