Related papers: The "Monkey Typing Shakespeare" Problem for Compos…
Does combining a finite collection of objects infinitely many times guarantee the construction of a particular object? Here we use recursive function theory to examine the popular scenario of an infinite collection of typing monkeys…
The Infinite Monkey Theorem states that if one monkey randomly hits the keys in front of a typewriter keyboard during an infinite amount of time, any works written by William Shakespeare will almost surely be typed out at the end of the…
It has often been said, correctly, that a monkey forever randomly typing on a keyboard would eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Almost just as often it has been pointed out that this "eventually" is well beyond…
We determine the behavior of Tanton's candy-passing game for all distributions of at least 3n-2 candies, where n is the number of students. Specifically, we show that the configuration of candy in such a game eventually becomes fixed.
To an adult, it's obvious that the day of someone's death is not precisely determined by the day of birth, but it's a very different story for a child. When the third named author was four years old he asked his father, the fifth named…
Children, sitting in a circle, each have a nonnegative number of candies in front of them. A whistle is blown and each child with more than one candy passes one candy to the left and one to the right. The sharing process is repeated until a…
"No two rainbows are the same. Neither are two packs of Skittles. Enjoy an odd mix!". Using an interpretation via spatial random walks, we quantify the probability that two randomly selected packs of Skittles candy are identical and…
We consider the following cake cutting game: Alice chooses a set P of n points in the square (cake) [0,1]^2, where (0,0) is in P; Bob cuts out n axis-parallel rectangles with disjoint interiors, each of them having a point of P as the lower…
We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…
We present new theoretical algorithms that sums the n-ary comparators output in order to get the permutation indices in order to sort a sequence. By analysing the parallel ranking algorithm, we found that the special comparators number of…
Candy Nim is a variant of Nim in which both players aim to take the last candy in a game of Nim, with the added simultaneous secondary goal of taking as many candies as possible. We give bounds on the number of candies the first and second…
This paper is concerned with learners who aim to learn patterns in infinite binary sequences: shown longer and longer initial segments of a binary sequence, they either attempt to predict whether the next bit will be a 0 or will be a 1 or…
We introduce a fun problem that can be considered as a variant of the classic birthday problem, the Bottleneck Birthday Problem (BBP). It is stated as: what is the maximum number of people we have to choose so that no day of the year has…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
In this methodological article on experimental-yet-rigorous enumerative combinatorics, we use two instructive case studies, to show that often, just like Alexander the Great before us, the simple, "cheating" solution to a hard problem is…
The $n$-queens puzzle is to place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n \times n$ chessboard. We present a simple two stage randomized algorithm to construct such configurations. In the first stage, a random greedy algorithm constructs…
Two people meet in a coffeehouse and decide to share one dessert from a menu of several possible choices. How should they choose which one? A method is presented that is intended to be practical, avoiding the need for long negotiations or…
Suppose $n$ different pairs of socks are put in a tumble dryer. When the dryer is finished socks are taken out one by one, if a sock matches one of the socks on the sorting table both are removed, otherwise it is put on the table until its…
There is a set of n indivisible items (or chores), and a set of n players. Each day, a single item should be assigned to each player. We want to ensure that all players feel that they have been treated fairly, not only after the last day,…
In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear…