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Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which…
We study the mathematical properties of probabilistic processes in which the independent actions of $n$ players (`causes') can influence the outcome of each player (`effects'). In such a setting, each pair of outcomes will generally be…
We introduce a parallel machine scheduling problem in which the processing times of jobs are not given in advance but are determined by a system of linear constraints. The objective is to minimize the makespan, i.e., the maximum job…
The napkin problem was first posed by John H. Conway, and written up as a `toughie' in "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection," by Peter Winkler. To paraphrase Winkler's book, there is a banquet dinner to be served at a…
We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…
Cerny's conjecture is a longstanding open problem in automata theory. We study two different concepts, which allow to approach it from a new angle. The first one is the triple rendezvous time, i.e., the length of the shortest word mapping…
Existing statistical approaches to natural language problems are very coarse approximations to the true complexity of language processing. As such, no single technique will be best for all problem instances. Many researchers are examining…
We study classic cake-cutting problems, but in discrete models rather than using infinite-precision real values, specifically, focusing on their communication complexity. Using general discrete simulations of classical infinite-precision…
The paper presents two algorithms for finding irreducible decomposition of monomial ideals. The first one is recursive, derived from staircase structures of monomial ideals. This algorithm has a good performance for highly non-generic…
We consider computing the longest palindrome in a text of length $n$ in the streaming model, where the characters arrive one-by-one, and we do not have random access to the input. While computing the answer exactly using sublinear memory is…
Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…
We consider the classic problem of envy-free division of a heterogeneous good ("cake") among several agents. It is known that, when the allotted pieces must be connected, the problem cannot be solved by a finite algorithm for 3 or more…
There are (at least) three approaches to quantifying information. The first, algorithmic information or Kolmogorov complexity, takes events as strings and, given a universal Turing machine, quantifies the information content of a string as…
Can you decide if there is a coincidence in the numbers counting two different combinatorial objects? For example, can you decide if two regions in $\mathbb{R}^3$ have the same number of domino tilings? There are two versions of the…
We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…
Sandhi means to join two or more words to coin new word. Sandhi literally means `putting together' or combining (of sounds), It denotes all combinatory sound-changes effected (spontaneously) for ease of pronunciation. Sandhi-vicheda…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDP) as generators of sequences of probability distributions over states. A probability distribution is p-synchronizing if the probability mass is at least p in a single state, or in a given set of…
Testing probabilistic programs is non-trivial due to their stochastic nature. Given an input, the program may produce different outcomes depending on the underlying stochastic choices in the program. This means testing the expected outcomes…
Inspired by the Stochastic processes described by the Feller Coupling and Chinese Restaurant Processes, we create four different bijections from words in the set $[1]\times [2] \times\cdot \times[n]$ to $S_n$. We then compose these maps…
Replicability requires that algorithmic conclusions remain consistent when rerun on independently drawn data. A central structural question is composition: given $k$ problems each admitting a $\rho$-replicable algorithm with sample…