Related papers: Protecting billiard balls from collisions
Methodology is provided towards the solution of the minimum enclosing ball problem. This problem concerns the determination of the unique spherical surface of smallest radius enclosing a given bounded set in the d-dimensional Euclidean…
We analyze the two-player game of Knock 'em Down, asymptotically as the number of tokens to be knocked down becomes large. Optimal play requires mixed strategies with deviations of order sqrt(n) from the naive law-of-large numbers…
We introduce the theory of div point sets, which aims to provide a framework to study the combinatoric nature of any set of points in general position on an Euclidean plane. We then show that proving the unsatisfiability of some first-order…
Primal and dual algorithms are developed for solving the $n$-dimensional convex optimization problem of finding the Euclidean ball of minimum radius that covers $m$ given Euclidean balls, each with a given center and radius. Each algorithm…
A billiard is a dynamical system in which a particle alternates between motion in a straight line and specular reflection from a boundary. For billiards in non-convex areas bounded by segments of confocal quadrics are studied. The topology…
A comparison of escape rates from one and from two holes in an experimental container (e.g. a laser trap) can be used to obtain information about the dynamics inside the container. If this dynamics is simple enough one can hope to obtain…
We consider the free motion of a point particle inside a circular billiard with periodically moving boundary, with the assumption that the collisions of the particle with the boundary are elastic so that the energy of the particle is not…
We study a class of elliptic billiards with a Keplerian potential inside, considering two cases: a reflective one, where the particle reflects elastically on the boundary, and a refractive one, where the particle can cross the billiard's…
We introduce and study Minkowski games. These are two player games, where the players take turns to chose positions in $\mathbb{R}^d$ based on some rules. Variants include boundedness games, where one player wants to keep the positions…
In this paper, we define a variant of billiards in which the ball bounces around a square grid erasing walls as it goes. We prove that there exist periodic tunnels with arbitrarily large period from any possible starting point, that there…
We demonstrate that the free motion of any two-dimensional rigid body colliding elastically with two parallel, flat walls is equivalent to a billiard system. Using this equivalence, we analyze the integrable and chaotic properties of this…
We consider a class of random billiards in a tube, where reflection angles at collisions with the boundary of the tube are random variables rather than deterministic (and elastic) quantities. We obtain a (non-standard) Central Limit Theorem…
In an ordinary billiard system trajectories of a Hamiltonian system are elastically reflected after a collision with a hypersurface (scatterer). If the scatterer is a submanifold of codimension more than one, we say that the billiard is…
We consider a 2-player permutation game inspired by the celebrated Erd\H{o}s-Szekeres Theorem. The game depends on two positive integer parameters $a$ and $b$ and we determine the winner and give a winning strategy when $a \geq b$ and $b…
Given a sphere of any radius $r$ in an $n$-dimensional Euclidean space, we study the coverings of this sphere with solid spheres of radius one. Our goal is to design a covering of the lowest covering density, which defines the average…
We study biased Maker-Breaker positional games between two players, one of whom is playing randomly against an opponent with an optimal strategy. In this work we focus on the case of Breaker playing randomly and Maker being "clever". The…
An annular billiard is a dynamical system in which a particle moves freely in a disk except for elastic collisions with the boundary, and also a circular scatterer in the interior of the disk. We investigate stability properties of some…
Wire billiard is defined by a smooth embedded closed curve of non-vanishing curvature $k$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$ (a wire). For a class of curves, that we call nice wires, the wire billiard map is area preserving twist map of the cylinder. In…
A two-player one-round binary game consists of two cooperative players who each replies by one bit to a message that he receives privately; they win the game if both questions and answers satisfy some predetermined property. A game is…
Consider a well-shuffled deck of cards of $n$ different types where each type occurs $m$ times. In a complete feedback game, a player is asked to guess the top card from the deck. After each guess, the top card is revealed to the player and…