Related papers: A Note on a Picture-Hanging Puzzle
How many shuffles are needed to mix up a deck of cards? This question may be answered in the language of a random walk on the symmetric group, $S_{52}$. This generalises neatly to the study of random walks on finite groups, themselves a…
The bondage number of a nonempty graph $G$ is the cardinality of a smallest edge set whose removal from $G$ results in a graph with domination number greater than the domination number of $G$. This lecture gives a survey on the bondage…
Nonlinear complexity, as an important measure for assessing the randomness of sequences, is defined as the length of the shortest feedback shift registers that can generate a given sequence. In this paper, the structure of n-periodic binary…
This paper presents the following results on sets that are complete for NP. 1. If there is a problem in NP that requires exponential time at almost all lengths, then every many-one NP-complete set is complete under length-increasing…
Hypergraphs are structures that can be decomposed or described; in other words they are recursively countable. Here, we get exact and asymptotic enumeration results on hypergraphs by means of exponential generating functions. The number of…
The analysis of several algorithms and data structures can be framed as a peeling process on a random hypergraph: vertices with degree less than k and their adjacent edges are removed until no vertices of degree less than k are left. Often…
Given a graph $G$ and a coloring of its edges, a subgraph of $G$ is called rainbow if its edges have distinct colors. The rainbow girth of an edge coloring of G is the minimum length of a rainbow cycle in G. A generalization of the famous…
We study a game in which one keeps flipping a coin until a given finite string of heads and tails occurs. We find the expected number of coin flips to end the game when the ending string consists of at most four maximal runs of heads or…
We consider straight line drawings of a planar graph $G$ with possible edge crossings. The \emph{untangling problem} is to eliminate all edge crossings by moving as few vertices as possible to new positions. Let $fix(G)$ denote the maximum…
For any configuration of pebbles on the nodes of a graph, a pebbling move replaces two pebbles on one node by one pebble on an adjacent node. A cover pebbling is a move sequence ending with no empty nodes. The number of pebbles needed for a…
We revisit a classical crossword filling puzzle which already appeared in Garey\&Jonhson's book. We are given a grid with $n$ vertical and horizontal slots and a dictionary with $m$ words and are asked to place words from the dictionary in…
We consider the problem of enumerating periodic $\sigma$-juggling sequences of length $n$ for multiplex juggling, where $\sigma$ is the initial state (or {\em landing schedule}) of the balls. We first show that this problem is equivalent to…
Minimum Bisection denotes the NP-hard problem to partition the vertex set of a graph into two sets of equal sizes while minimizing the width of the bisection, which is defined as the number of edges between these two sets. We first consider…
Nondango is a pencil puzzle consisting of a rectangular grid partitioned into regions, with some cells containing a white circle. The player has to color some circles black such that every region contains exactly one black circle, and there…
We discuss the following folklore problem. On a bookshelf, there are $N$ tomes of the Encyclopedia in random order. Each hour, a librarian takes a tome which stands not on its place, and puts it in its place. Show that the process will…
We first introduce the Hamming distance between two strings. Then, we apply this concept to the representations of whole numbers in base n for all positive integers n > 2. We claim that a simple formula exists for the sum of all Hamming…
A dominating set of a graph is a subset $D$ of its vertices such that every vertex not in $D$ is adjacent to at least one member of $D$. The domination number of a graph $G$ is the number of vertices in a smallest dominating set of $G$. The…
A flipturn is an operation that transforms a nonconvex simple polygon into another simple polygon, by rotating a concavity 180 degrees around the midpoint of its bounding convex hull edge. Joss and Shannon proved in 1973 that a sequence of…
We study the richness of the ensemble of graphical structures (i.e., unlabeled graphs) of the one-dimensional random geometric graph model defined by $n$ nodes randomly scattered in $[0,1]$ that connect if they are within the connection…
Given a finite nonempty sequence S of integers, write it as XY^k, where Y^k is a power of greatest exponent that is a suffix of S: this k is the curling number of S. The Curling Number Conjecture is that if one starts with any initial…