Related papers: The "Monkey Typing Shakespeare" Problem for Compos…

This thesis concerns sequential-access data compression, i.e., by algorithms that read the input one or more times from beginning to end. In one chapter we consider adaptive prefix coding, for which we must read the input character by…

Distributive laws are a standard way of combining two monads, providing a compositional approach for reasoning about computational effects in semantics. Situations where no such law exists can sometimes be handled by weakening the notion of…

Inspired by real-world applications such as the assignment of pupils to schools or the allocation of social housing, the one-sided matching problem studies how a set of agents can be assigned to a set of objects when the agents have…

We consider probabilistic automata on infinite words with acceptance defined by parity conditions. We consider three qualitative decision problems: (i) the positive decision problem asks whether there is a word that is accepted with…

Consider equipping an alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ with a group action that partitions the set of words into equivalence classes which we call patterns. We answer standard questions for the Penney's game on patterns and show non-transitivity for…

Construct recursively a long string of words w1. .. wn, such that at each step k, w k+1 is a new word with a fixed probability p $\in$ (0, 1), and repeats some preceding word with complementary probability 1 -- p. More precisely, given a…

We prove, via 30 seconds of Maple computation, that there are 10^n words in the alphabet {3,-2} of length 5n, sum 0, and such that every factor that sums to 0 and that starts with a 3 may not be immediately followed by a -2.

How much is 56 times 37? Language models often make mistakes in these types of difficult calculations. This is usually explained by their inability to perform complex reasoning. Since language models rely on large training sets and great…

What makes a computational problem easy (e.g., in P, that is, solvable in polynomial time) or hard (e.g., NP-hard)? This fundamental question now has a satisfactory answer for a quite broad class of computational problems, so called…

Wordle is a popular, online word game offered by the New York Times (nytimes.com). Currently there are some 2 million players of the English version worldwide. Players have 6 attempts to guess the daily word (target word) and after each…

Computer-based tests with randomly generated questions allow a large number of different tests to be generated. Given a fixed number of alternatives for each question, the number of tests that need to be generated before all possible…

Raymond Smullyan came up with a puzzle that George Boolos called The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever.[1] The puzzle has truthful, lying, and random gods who answer yes or no questions with words that we don't know the meaning of. The challenge is…

The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…

Question Answering for complex questions is often modeled as a graph construction or traversal task, where a solver must build or traverse a graph of facts that answer and explain a given question. This "multi-hop" inference has been shown…

The Sleeping Beauty problem is a probability riddle with no definite solution for more than two decades and its solution is of great interest in many fields of knowledge. There are two main competing solutions to the problem: the halfer…

In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…

Challenge the champ tournaments are one of the simplest forms of competition, where a (initially selected) champ is repeatedly challenged by other players. If a player beats the champ, then that player is considered the new (current) champ.…

The Sleeping Beauty problem is a puzzle in probability theory that has gained much attention since Elga's discussion of it [Elga, Adam, Analysis 60 (2), p.143-147 (2000)]. Sleeping Beauty is put asleep, and a coin is tossed. If the outcome…

Problems in probability theory prove to be one of the most challenging for students. Here, we formulate and discuss four related problems in probability theory that proved difficult for first to fourth-year undergraduate students whose…

We consider the distributed control synthesis problem for systems with locks. The goal is to find local controllers so that the global system does not deadlock. With no restriction this problem is undecidable even for three processes each…