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Given $n$ elements, an integer $k$ and a parameter $\varepsilon$, we study to select an element with rank in $(k-n\varepsilon,k+n\varepsilon]$ using unreliable comparisons where the outcome of each comparison is incorrect independently with…

We study the problem of identifying an n-bit string using a single quantum query to an oracle that computes the Hamming distance between the query and hidden strings. The standard action of the oracle on a response register of dimension r…

This article is devoted to the problem of predicting the value taken by a random permutation $\Sigma$, describing the preferences of an individual over a set of numbered items $\{1,\; \ldots,\; n\}$ say, based on the observation of an…

The Gap-Hamming-Distance problem arose in the context of proving space lower bounds for a number of key problems in the data stream model. In this problem, Alice and Bob have to decide whether the Hamming distance between their $n$-bit…

Consider the problem: we are given $n$ boxes, labeled $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$ by an adversary, each containing a single number chosen from an unknown distribution; these $n$ distributions are not necessarily identical. We are also given an…

Many proofs in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science are based on the probabilistic method. To prove the existence of a good object, we pick a random object and show that it is bad with low probability. This method is…

In the classical secretary problem, $n$ ranked items arrive one by one, and each item's rank relative to its predecessors is noted. The observer must select or reject each item as it arrives, with the object of selecting the item of highest…

When people pursue rewards in stochastic environments, they often match their choice frequencies to the observed target frequencies, even when this policy is demonstrably sub-optimal. We used a ``hide and seek'' task to evaluate this…

We introduce a new measure of information-theoretic secrecy based on rate-distortion theory and study it in the context of the Shannon cipher system. Whereas rate-distortion theory is traditionally concerned with a single reconstruction…

We consider generalizations of the classical secretary problem, also known as the problem of optimal choice, to posets where the only information we have is the size of the poset and the number of maximal elements. We show that, given this…

We consider the problem of estimating the number of distinct elements in a large data set (or, equivalently, the support size of the distribution induced by the data set) from a random sample of its elements. The problem occurs in many…

Consider two problems about an unknown probability distribution $p$: 1. How many samples from $p$ are required to test if $p$ is supported on $n$ elements or not? Specifically, given samples from $p$, determine whether it is supported on at…

Materials discovery is often compared to the challenge of finding a needle in a haystack. While much work has focused on accurately predicting the properties of candidate materials with machine learning (ML), which amounts to evaluating…

Selection HHs are randomised search methodologies which choose and execute heuristics during the optimisation process from a set of low-level heuristics. A machine learning mechanism is generally used to decide which low-level heuristic…

When primed with only a handful of training samples, very large, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 have shown competitive results when compared to fully-supervised, fine-tuned, large, pretrained language models. We demonstrate that…

We formulate and study a statistical version of Katona's two-round search problem of finding at least one excellent element in a set. A population of $n$ elements is considered, where each element is independently excellent with probability…

We show that several versions of Floyd and Rivest's improved algorithm Select for finding the $k$th smallest of $n$ elements require at most $n+\min\{k,n-k\}+O(n^{1/2}\ln^{1/2}n)$ comparisons on average and with high probability. This…

When a problem instance is perturbed by a small modification, one would hope to find a good solution for the new instance by building on a known good solution for the previous one. Via a rigorous mathematical analysis, we show that…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be tasked with scoring texts according to pre-defined criteria and on a defined scale, but there is no recognised optimal prompting strategy for this. This article focuses on the task of LLMs scoring journal…

Despite their impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit unwanted uncertainty, a phenomenon where a model changes a previously correct answer into an incorrect one when re-prompted. This behavior undermines trust and…