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We introduce a problem set-up we call the Iterated Matching Pennies (IMP) game and show that it is a powerful framework for the study of three problems: adversarial learnability, conventional (i.e., non-adversarial) learnability and…
This paper solves a pursuit-evasion problem in which a prince must find a princess who is constrained to move on each day from one vertex of a finite graph to another. Unlike the related and much studied `Cops and Robbers Game', the prince…
The following system of equations {x_1 \cdot x_1=x_2, x_2 \cdot x_2=x_3, 2^{2^{x_1}}=x_3, x_4 \cdot x_5=x_2, x_6 \cdot x_7=x_2} has exactly one solution in ({\mathbb N}\{0,1})^7, namely (2,4,16,2,2,2,2). Hypothesis 1 states that if a system…
A chessboard has the property that every row and every column has as many white squares as black squares. In this mostly methodological note, we address the problem of counting such rectangular arrays with a fixed (numeric) number of rows,…
The single- and multi- processor cup games can be used to model natural problems in areas such as processor scheduling, deamortization, and buffer management. At the beginning of the single-processor cup game, $n$ cups are initially empty.…
We study the problem of fairly allocating a divisible resource, also known as cake cutting, with an additional requirement that the shares that different agents receive should be sufficiently separated from one another. This captures, for…
We study learning of indexed families from positive data where a learner can freely choose a hypothesis space (with uniformly decidable membership) comprising at least the languages to be learned. This abstracts a very universal learning…
The MandM Game involves two players who begin with I1 and I2 MandM's. During each round, each player tosses a fair coin: if the coin lands heads, that player eats one MandM, and if it lands tails, the player does not eat. If, at the end of…
We investigated long range correlations in two literary texts, Moby Dick by H. Melville and Grimm's tales. The analysis is based on the calculation of entropy like quantities as the mutual information for pairs of letters and the entropy,…
We give a new proof that any candy-passing game on a graph G with at least 4|E(G)|-|V(G)| candies stabilizes. (This result was first proven in arXiv:0807.4450.) Unlike the prior literature on candy-passing games, we use methods from the…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
The aim of this paper is to solve the "gift exchange" problem: you are one of n players, and there are n wrapped gifts on display; when your turn comes, you can either choose any of the remaining wrapped gifts, or you can "steal" a gift…
We first describe three algorithms for computing the Lyndon array that have been suggested in the literature, but for which no structured exposition has been given. Two of these algorithms execute in quadratic time in the worst case, the…
Since Cocke and Minsky proved 2-tag systems universal, they have been extensively used to prove the universality of numerous computational models. Unfortunately, all known algorithms give universal 2-tag systems that have a large number of…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
We analyze the competitive ratio and the advice complexity of the online unbounded knapsack problem. An instance is given as a sequence of n items with a size and a value each, and an algorithm has to decide how often to pack each item into…
We explain how the prototype automatic chess problem composer, Chesthetica, successfully composed a rare and interesting chess problem using the new Digital Synaptic Neural Substrate (DSNS) computational creativity approach. This problem…
We present a number of positive and negative results for variants of the matroid secretary problem. Most notably, we design a constant-factor competitive algorithm for the "random assignment" model where the weights are assigned randomly to…
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in consecutive pattern avoidance in permutations. In this paper, we introduce two approaches to counting permutations that avoid a set of prescribed patterns consecutively. These algoritms…
We introduce an algorithm for the uniform generation of infinite traces, i.e., infinite words up to commutation of some letters. The algorithm outputs on-the-fly approximations of a theoretical infinite trace, the latter being distributed…