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Humans can generate reasonable answers to novel queries (Schulz, 2012): if I asked you what kind of food you want to eat for lunch, you would respond with a food, not a time. The thought that one would respond "After 4pm" to "What would you…
The muffin problem asks us to divide $m$ muffins into pieces and assign each of those pieces to one of $s$ students so that the sizes of the pieces assigned to each student total $m/s$, with the objective being to maximize the size of the…
The Monty Hall puzzle has been solved and dissected in many ways, but always using probabilistic arguments, so it is considered a probability puzzle. In this paper the puzzle is set up as an orthodox statistical problem involving an unknown…
Given a set of $p$ players we consider problems concerning envy-free allocation of collections of $k$ pieces from a given set of goods or chores. We show that if $p\le n$ and each player can choose $k$ pieces out of $n$ pieces of a cake,…
This article explores the theoretical and computational aspects of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, investigating the number of attempts and the time required for a set of pseudorandom characters to assemble and recite Hamlets iconic phrase, To…
We show how to enumerate words in $1^{m_1} \dots n^{m_n}$ that avoid the increasing consecutive pattern $12 \dots r$ for any $r \geq 2$. Our approach yields an $O(n^{s+1})$ algorithm to enumerate words in $1^s \dots n^s$, avoiding the…
A cake has to be divided fairly among $n$ agents. When all agents have equal entitlements, it is known that such a division can be implemented with $n-1$ cuts. When agents may have different entitlements, the paper shows that at least $2 n…
In this article we introduce two new perfect simulation algorithms for chains with infinite memory. Both algorithms belong to the coupling of past procedures. The novelty of our approach is that it allows to include unknown states to the…
Wordle is a very popular word game that is owned by the New York Times. We can design parameterized strategies for solving Wordle, based on probabilistic, statistical, and information-theoretical information about the games. The strategies…
Consider $n$ points evenly spaced on a circle, and a path of $n-1$ chords that uses each point once. There are $m=\lfloor n/2\rfloor$ possible chord lengths, so the path defines a multiset of $n-1$ elements drawn from $\{1,2,\ldots,m\}$.…
Cake cutting is a classic fair division problem, with the cake serving as a metaphor for a heterogeneous divisible resource. Recently, it was shown that for any number of players with arbitrary preferences over a cake, it is possible to…
The problem addressed concerns the determination of the average number of successive attempts of guessing a word of a certain length consisting of letters with given probabilities of occurrence. Both first- and second-order approximations…
We undertake the first study of the candy-passing game on arbitrary connected graphs. We obtain a general stabilization result which encompasses the first author's results (arXiv:0709.2156) for candy-passing games on n-cycles with at least…
We give several modifications of the Goulden-Jackson Cluster method for finding generating functions for words avoiding a given set of forbidden words. Our modifications include functions which can take into account various 'weights' on…
The possible consequences for the same context may vary depending on the situation we refer to. However, current studies in natural language processing do not focus on situated commonsense reasoning under multiple possible scenarios. This…
The central question in the game theory of cake-cutting is how to fairly distribute a finite resource among multiple players. Most research has focused on how to do this for a heterogeneous cake in a situation where the players do not have…
Assume that letters (from a finite alphabet) in a text form a Markov chain. We track two distinct words, $U$ and $D$. A gambler gains 1 point for each occurrence of $U$ (including overlapping occurrences) and loses 1 point for each…
We extract brilliant ideas of Sandi Klavzar, Michel Mollard, and Marko Petkovsek who used them to solve one very specific enumeration problem, namely counting the number of words in the alphabet {0,1} of length n avoiding two consecutive…
Is the human language understander a collection of modular processes operating with relative autonomy, or is it a single integrated process? This ongoing debate has polarized the language processing community, with two fundamentally…
Snake is a classic computer game, which has been around for decades. Based on this game, we study the game of Snake on arbitrary undirected graphs. A snake forms a simple path that has to move to an apple while avoiding colliding with…