Related papers: The Coupon Collector's Brother

We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…

Consider $n$ players whose "scores" are independent and identically distributed values $\{X_i\}_{i=1}^n$ from some discrete distribution $F$. We pay special attention to the cases where (i) $F$ is geometric with parameter $p\to0$ and (ii)…

This paper explores the distribution of indistinguishable balls into distinct urns with varying capacity constraints, a foundational issue in combinatorial mathematics with applications across various disciplines. We present a comprehensive…

In some recent papers the classical `splitting necklace theorem' is linked in an interesting way with a geometric `pattern avoidance problem'. We explore the topological constraints on the existence of a (relaxed) measurable coloring of R^d…

In this paper, we study how the probability of presence of a particle is distributed between the two parts of a composite fermionic system. We uncover that the difference of probability depends on the energy in a striking way and show the…

Generalizing a problem posed by Cover, we propose an adversarial game in which a permutation is incrementally constructed in a setting of partial information. As in the secretary problem, this permutation is exposed in stages via the…

Let \sigma(n) be the sum of divisors of a positive integer n. Robin's theorem states that the Riemann hypothesis is equivalent to the inequality \sigma(n)<e^\gamma n\log\log n for all n>5040 (\gamma is Euler's constant). It is a natural…

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.…

In the gift exchange game there are n players and n wrapped gifts. When a player's number is called, that person can either choose one of the remaining wrapped gifts, or can "steal" a gift from someone who has already unwrapped it, subject…

In this work the asymptotic properties of $Q_t(N)$ ,the probability of the number of renewals ($N$), that occur during time $t$ are explored. While the forms of the distribution at very long times, i.e. $t\to\infty$, are very well known and…

This paper studies a Shannon-theoretic version of the generalized distribution preserving quantization problem where a stationary and memoryless source is encoded subject to a distortion constraint and the additional requirement that the…

The task of the binary classification problem is to determine which of two distributions has generated a length-$n$ test sequence. The two distributions are unknown; two training sequences of length $N$, one from each distribution, are…

The problem of linear and circular permutations of n identical objects in m boxes, where a limit l is imposed on the number of objects in a box, is considered. In the linear case, where the boxes are arranged as a row, two methods of…

Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial…

In this paper, we first consider a family of constraints given by straight lines. For a uniform probability distribution, we determine the constrained optimal sets of $n$-points and the corresponding $n$th constrained quantization errors…

This paper gives two sharp bounds for the generalized ballot problem with candidate A receiving at least \mu times as candidate B for an arbitrary real number \mu.

We propose a new method, probabilistic divide-and-conquer, for improving the success probability in rejection sampling. For the example of integer partitions, there is an ideal recursive scheme which improves the rejection cost from…

We obtain the analogue of the classical result by Erd\"os and Kac on the limiting distribution of the maximum of partial sums for exchangeable random variables with zero mean and variance one. We show that, if the conditions of the central…

In this paper, we study additional aspects of the capacity distribution on the set $\mathcal{B}_n$ of compositions of $n$ consisting of $1$'s and $2$'s. Among our results are further recurrences for this distribution as well as formulas for…

We investigate the positivity of double parton distributions with a non-trivial dependence on the parton colour. It turns out that positivity is not preserved by leading-order evolution from lower to higher scales, in contrast to the case…