Related papers: The Problem of Pawns
We study a two-person game played on graphs based on the widely studied chip-firing game. Players Max and Min alternately place chips on the vertices of a graph. When a vertex accumulates as many chips as its degree, it fires, sending one…
Mathematics has been used in the exploration and enumeration of juggling patterns. In the case when we catch and throw one ball at a time the number of possible juggling patterns is well-known. When we are allowed to catch and throw any…
We consider $m$-divisible non-crossing partitions of $\{1,2,\ldots,mn\}$ with the property that for some $t\leq n$ no block contains more than one of the first $t$ integers. We give a closed formula for the number of multi-chains of such…
Let $s(n)$ be the side length of the smallest square into which $n$ non-overlapping unit squares can be packed. In 2010, the author showed that $s(13)=4$ and $s(46)=7$. Together with the result $s(6)=3$ by Keaney and Shiu, these results…
We present an algorithmic framework for computing anti-chains of maximum size in geometric posets. Specifically, posets in which the entities are geometric objects, where comparability of two entities is implicitly defined but can be…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…
A leaper is a chess piece which generalises the knight. Given $n$ and a $(p, q)$-leaper $L$, we study the greatest $m$ such that the $m \times m$ grid graph can be embedded into the $n \times n$ leaper graph of $L$. We can assume that $p$…
We study polynomial systems whose equations have as common support a set C of n+2 points in Z^n called a circuit. We find a bound on the number of real solutions to such systems which depends on n, the dimension of the affine span of the…
We give the asymptotic growth of the number of primitive periodic trajectories of a two dimensional dispersive billiard, when we prescribe their number of bounces on one of the obstacles.
We revisit a version of the classic occupancy scheme, where balls are thrown until almost all boxes receive a given number of balls. Special cases are widely known as coupon-collectors and dixie cup problems. We show that as the number of…
We consider a variant of the planted clique problem where we are allowed unbounded computational time but can only investigate a small part of the graph by adaptive edge queries. We determine (up to logarithmic factors) the number of…
We expand the theory of pebbling to graphs with weighted edges. In a weighted pebbling game, one player distributes a set amount of weight on the edges of a graph and his opponent chooses a target vertex and places a configuration of…
The two-players N strategies games quantized according to the Eisert-Lewenstein-Wilkens scheme [1] are considered. It is shown that in the case of maximal entanglement no nontrivial pure Nash equilibrium exists. The proof relies on simple…
We prove that the number of multigraphs with vertex set $\{1, \ldots, n\}$ such that every four vertices span at most nine edges is $a^{n^2 + o(n^2)}$ where $a$ is transcendental (assuming Schanuel's conjecture from number theory). This is…
Let $S$ be an $n$-punctured sphere, with $n \geq 3$. We prove that $\binom{n}{3}$ is the maximum size of a family of pairwise non-homotopic simple arcs on $S$ joining a fixed pair of distinct punctures of $S$ and pairwise intersecting at…
Conway Checkers is a game played with a checker placed in each square of the lower half of an infinite checkerboard. Pieces move by jumping over an adjacent checker, removing the checker jumped over. Conway showed that it is not possible to…
The framework outlined in [arXiv:2010.13024] provides an approximation algorithm for computing Nash equilibria of normal form games. Since NASH is a well-known PPAD-complete problem, this framework has potential applications to other $PPAD$…
The width of a poset is the size of its largest antichain. Sperner's theorem states that $(2^{[n]},\subset)$ is a poset whose width equals the size of its largest layer. We show that Hamming ball posets also have this property. This extends…
A partition n = p_1 + p_2 + ... + p_k with 1 <= p_1 <= p_2 <= ... <= p_k is called non-squashing if p_1 + ... + p_j <= p_{j+1} for 1 <= j <= k-1. Hirschhorn and Sellers showed that the number of non-squashing partitions of n is equal to the…
Chess tableaux are a special kind of standard Young tableaux where, in the chessboard coloring of the Young diagram, even numbers always appear in white cells and odd numbers in black cells. If, for $\lambda$ a partition of $n$,…