Related papers: The lost boarding pass, and other practical proble…
We introduce a fun problem that can be considered as a variant of the classic birthday problem, the Bottleneck Birthday Problem (BBP). It is stated as: what is the maximum number of people we have to choose so that no day of the year has…
Walks in the plane taking unit-length steps north and east from $(0,0)$ to $(n,n)$ never dropping below $y=x$ and parking cars subject to preferences are two intriguing ingredients in a formula conjectured in 2005, now famously known as the…
We investigate the first-passage properties of nearest-neighbor hopping on a finite interval with disordered hopping rates. We develop an approach that relies on the backward equation, in conjunction with probability generating functions,…
The paper concerns the classical occupancy scheme with infinitely many boxes. We establish approximations to the distributions of the number of occupied boxes, and of the number of boxes containing exactly r balls, within the family of…
In studying randomized search heuristics, a frequent quantity of interest is the first time a (real-valued) stochastic process obtains (or passes) a certain value. The processes under investigation commonly show a bias towards this goal,…
An occupancy problem with an infinite number of bins and a random probability vector for the locations of the balls is considered. The respective sizes of bins are related to the split times of a Yule process. The asymptotic behavior of the…
Considering the optimal alignment of two i.i.d. random sequences of length $n$, we show that when the scoring function is chosen randomly, almost surely the empirical distribution of aligned letter pairs in all optimal alignments converges…
Brownian diffusion subject to stochastic resetting to a fixed position has been widely studied for applications to random search processes. In an unbounded domain, the mean first-passage time at a target site can be minimized for a…
The transportation problem in the plane - how to move a set of objects from one set of points to another set of points in the cheapest way - is a very old problem going back several hundreds of years. In recent years the solution of the…
Suppose that $m$ drivers each choose a preferred parking space in a linear car park with $n$ spots. In order, each driver goes to their chosen spot and parks there if possible, and otherwise takes the next available spot if it exists. If…
The subject of this article is the introduction of a new concept of well-posedness of Bayesian inverse problems. The conventional concept of (Lipschitz, Hellinger) well-posedness in [Stuart 2010, Acta Numerica 19, pp. 451-559] is difficult…
For any physical observable in statistical systems, the most frequently studied quantities are its average and standard deviation. Yet, its full distribution often carries extremely interesting information and can be invoked to put any…
Recent decades have seen an interest in prediction problems for which Bayesian methodology has been used ubiquitously. Sampling from or approximating the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian model allows one to make inferential…
By periodically returning a search process to a known or random state, random resetting possesses the potential to unveil new trajectories, sidestep potential obstacles, and consequently enhance the efficiency of locating desired targets.…
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…
We show that airplane boarding can be asymptotically modeled by 2-dimensional Lorentzian geometry. Boarding time is given by the maximal proper time among curves in the model. Discrepancies between the model and simulation results are…
The aircraft routing problem is one of the most studied problems of operations research applied to aircraft management. It involves assigning flights to aircraft while ensuring regular visits to maintenance bases. This paper examines two…
When shuffling a deck of cards, one probably wants to make sure it is thoroughly shuffled. A way to do this is by sifting through the cards to ensure that no adjacent cards are the same number, because surely this is a poorly shuffled deck.…
This study investigates how the layout and density of seats in aircraft cabins influence the pricing of airline tickets on domestic flights. The analysis is based on microdata from boarding passes linked to face-to-face interviews with…
The presence of temporal correlations in random movement trajectories is a widespread phenomenon across biological, chemical and physical systems. The ubiquity of persistent and anti-persistent motion in many natural and synthetic systems…