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In this paper, we consider a game played on a rectangular $m \times n$ gridded chocolate bar. Each move, a player breaks the bar along a grid line. Each move after that consists of taking any piece of chocolate and breaking it again along…
In Problem #1542 of Mathematics Magazine, Grossman and Turett define the Cantor game. In his 2007 Mathematics Magazine article about the Cantor game, Matt Baker proves several results and poses three challenging questions about it: Do there…
We study the fair allocation of a cake, which serves as a metaphor for a divisible resource, under the requirement that each agent should receive a contiguous piece of the cake. While it is known that no finite envy-free algorithm exists in…
Assume you have a 2-dimensional pizza with $2n$ ingredients that you want to share with your friend. For this you are allowed to cut the pizza using several straight cuts, and then give every second piece to your friend. You want to do this…
The fundamental question considered in algorithms on strings is that of indexing, that is, preprocessing a given string for specific queries. By now we have a number of efficient solutions for this problem when the queries ask for an exact…
This article, based on a talk, treats some elementary, but not completely simple examples from probability. They concern multiple birthday coincidences, throwing dice, the combinatorics of the German card game "Doppelkopf", and the…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
For a family of multidimensional gambler models we provide formulas for the winning probabilities (in terms of parameters of the system) and for the distribution of game duration (in terms of eigenvalues of underlying one-dimensional…
A moldable job is a job that can be executed on an arbitrary number of processors, and whose processing time depends on the number of processors allotted to it. A moldable job is monotone if its work doesn't decrease for an increasing…
We study the complexity of solving two-player infinite duration games played on a fixed finite graph, where the control of a node is not predetermined but rather assigned randomly. In classic random-turn games, control of each node is…
Sampling permutations from S_n is a fundamental problem from probability theory. The nearest neighbor transposition chain \cal{M}}_{nn} is known to converge in time \Theta(n^3 \log n) in the uniform case and time \Theta(n^2) in the constant…
Define a building blocks set to be a collection of n cubes (each with six sides) where each side is assigned one letter and one color from a palette of m colors. We propose a novel problem of assigning letters and colors to each face so as…
In this note we study a problem of fair division in the absence of full information. We give an algorithm which solves the following problem: n $\ge$ 2 persons want to cut a cake into n shares so that each person will get at least 1/n of…
A camel can carry $B$ bananas on its back. It can have $2$ bananas at a time in its stomach. For each mile the camel walks, the amount of bananas in its stomach decreases $1$. As soon as the amount of bananas in the camel's stomach is at…
We consider multi-layered cake cutting in order to fairly allocate numerous divisible resources (layers of cake) among a group of agents under two constraints: contiguity and feasibility. We first introduce a new computational model in a…
In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a peach'' and…
Consider the graph obtained by superposition of an independent pair of uniform infinite non-crossing perfect matchings of the set of integers. We prove that this graph contains at most one infinite path. Several motivations are discussed.
In the spirit of "multi-culturalism", we use four kinds of computations: simulation, numeric, symbolic, and "conceptual" to explore some "games of pure chance" inspired by children board games like "Snakes and Ladders" (aka as "Chutes and…
This paper presents a mathematical method of playing the puzzle game Wordle. In Wordle, the player has six tries to guess a secret word. After each guess the player is told how their guess compares to the secret word. With the available…
Composition theory can be used to analyze and enumerate the number of ways a dealer in Blackjack can reach any given point total. The rules of Blackjack provide several restrictions on the number of compositions of a given number. While…