Related papers: A path formula for the sock sorting problem
Associated to a random walk on $\mathbb{Z}$ and a positive integer $n$, there is a return probability of the random walk returning to the origin after $n$ steps. An interesting question is when the set of return probabilities uniquely…
This work studies rearrangement problems involving the sorting of robots or objects in stack-like containers, which can be accessed only from one side. Two scenarios are considered: one where every robot or object needs to reach a…
For a positive integer $n$, we study the number of steps to reach $n$ by a {\it Fibonacci walk} for some starting pair $a_1$ and $a_2$ satisfying the recurrence of $a_{k+2}=a_{k+1}+a_k$. The problem of slow Fibonacci walks, first suggested…
We study a sequential decision-making model where a set of items is repeatedly matched to the same set of agents over multiple rounds. The objective is to determine a sequence of matchings that either maximizes the utility of the least…
Let $N_n=\{1,2,...,n\}$. Elements are drawn from the set $N_n$ with replacement, assuming that each element has probability $1/n$ of being drawn. We determine the limiting distributions for the waiting time until the given portion of pairs…
Team assembly is a problem that demands trade-offs between multiple fairness criteria and computational optimization. We focus on four criteria: (i) fair distribution of workloads within the team, (ii) fair distribution of skills and…
A matching of the set $[2n]=\{ 1,2,\ldots ,2n\}$ is a partition of $[2n]$ into blocks with two elements, i.e. a graph on $[2n]$ such that every vertex has degree one. Given two matchings $\sigma$ and $\tau$ , we say that $\sigma$ is a…
In the infinite regular tree $\mathbb{T}_{q+1}$ with $q \in \mathbb{Z}_{\ge 2}$, we consider families $\{\mu_u^n\}$, indexed by vertices $u$ and nonnegative integers ("discrete time steps") $n$, of probability measures such that $\mu_u^n(v)…
We introduce a sorting machine consisting of $k+1$ stacks in series: the first $k$ stacks can only contain elements in decreasing order from top to bottom, while the last one has the opposite restriction. This device generalizes \cite{SM},…
We consider the following sports scheduling problem. Consider $2n$ teams in a sport league. Each pair of teams must play exactly one match in $2n-1$ days. That is, $n$ games are held simultaneously in a day. We want to make a schedule which…
For a first-order theory $T$, the Constraint Satisfaction Problem of $T$ is the computational problem of deciding whether a given conjunction of atomic formulas is satisfiable in some model of $T$. In this article we develop sufficient…
The two-dimensional cell-sorting problem is found to be mathematically equivalent to the one-dimensional random walk problem with pair creations and annihilations, i.e. the adhesion probabilities in the cell-sorting model relate…
We study first passage statistics of the Polya urn model. In this random process, the urn contains two types of balls. In each step, one ball is drawn randomly from the urn, and subsequently placed back into the urn together with an…
In this article, we give a polynomial algorithm to decide whether a given permutation $\sigma$ is sortable with two stacks in series. This is indeed a longstanding open problem which was first introduced by Knuth. He introduced the stack…
In this paper we enumerate the number of ways of selecting $k$ objects from $n$ objects arrayed in a line such that no two selected ones are separated by $m-1,2m-1,...,pm-1$ objects and provide three different formulas when $m,p\geq 1$ and…
We study the problem of decomposing (clustering) a tree with respect to costs attributed to pairs of nodes, so as to minimize the sum of costs for those pairs of nodes that are in the same component (cluster). For the general case and for…
A lattice path in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is a sequence $\nu_1,\nu_2,\ldots,\nu_k\in\mathbb{Z}^d$ such that the steps $\nu_i-\nu_{i-1}$ lie in a subset $\mathbf{S}$ of $\mathbb{Z}^d$ for all $i=2,\ldots,k$. Let $T_{m,n}$ be the $m\times n$ table in…
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, its separability is the minimum number of lines needed to separate all its pairs of points from each other. We show that the minimum number of lines needed to separate $n$ points, picked randomly…
We describe a hybrid procedure for solving the traveling salesman problem (TSP) to provable optimality. We first sparsify the instance, and then use a hybrid algorithm that combines a branch-and-cut TSP solver with a Hamiltonian cycle…
We consider Johnson's rule for minimizing the makespan in the two-machine flow shop problem. Although its worst-case time complexity is O(n log n), we show that it is possible to detect in linear time whether a full sorting of jobs can be…