Related papers: The "Monkey Typing Shakespeare" Problem for Compos…
We give an elementary statistical analysis of two High Performance Computing issues, processor cache mapping and network port mapping. In both cases we find that, as in the birthday paradox, random assignment leads to more frequent…
We characterize the words that can be mapped to arbitrarily high powers by injective morphisms. For all other words, we prove a linear upper bound for the highest power that they can be mapped to, and this bound is optimal up to a constant…
In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…
Imagine a sequence in which the first letter comes from a binary alphabet, the second letter can be chosen on an alphabet with 10 elements, the third letter can be chosen on an alphabet with 3 elements and so on. When such a sequence can be…
The Connections puzzle published each day by the New York Times tasks players with dividing a bank of sixteen words into four groups of four words that each relate to a common theme. Solving the puzzle requires both common linguistic…
This note investigates the combinatorics of permutations underlying the NYT daily word game Waffle. It helps to solve Waffle games and helps to understand why some games are easy to solve while others are very hard. It shows that a perfect…
We demonstrate that the forecasting combination puzzle is a consequence of the methodology commonly used to produce forecast combinations. By the combination puzzle, we refer to the empirical finding that predictions formed by combining…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
Assuming repeated independent sampling from a Bernoulli distribution with two possible outcomes S and F, there are formulas for computing the probability of one specific pattern of consecutive outcomes (such as SSFFSS) winning (i.e. being…
We study the disproportionate version of the classical cake-cutting problem: how efficiently can we divide a cake, here $[0,1]$, among $n$ agents with different demands $\alpha_1, \alpha_2, \dots, \alpha_n$ summing to $1$? When all the…
We harness both human ingenuity and the power of symbolic computation to study the number of coin tosses until reaching $n$ Heads or $m$ Tails. We also talk about the closely related problem of reaching $n$ Heads and $m$ Tails. This paper…
We propose a two-agent game wherein a questioner must be able to conjure discerning questions between sentences, incorporate responses from an answerer, and keep track of a hypothesis state. The questioner must be able to understand the…
Let us call a sequence of numbers heapable if they can be sequentially inserted to form a binary tree with the heap property, where each insertion subsequent to the first occurs at a leaf of the tree, i.e. below a previously placed number.…
A problem faced by many instructors is that of designing exams that accurately assess the abilities of the students. Typically these exams are prepared several days in advance, and generic question scores are used based on rough…
In the classic problem of fair cake-cutting, a single interval ("cake") has to be divided among n agents with different value measures, giving each agent a single sub-interval with a value of at least 1/n of the total. This paper studies a…
We play with a graph-theoretic analogue of the folklore infinite monkey theorem. We define a notion of graph likelihood as the probability that a given graph is constructed by a monkey in a number of time steps equal to the number of…
We investigate the problem of fairly dividing a divisible heterogeneous resource, also known as a cake, among a set of agents who may have different entitlements. We characterize the existence of a connected strongly-proportional allocation…
A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and…
A linear algorithm is described for solving the n-Queens Completion problem for an arbitrary composition of k queens, consistently distributed on a chessboard of size n x n. Two important rules are used in the algorithm: a) the rule of…
This paper is composed of two main results concerning chains of infinite order which are not necessarily continuous. The first one is a decomposition of the transition probability kernel as a countable mixture of unbounded probabilistic…