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We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-29 Sergi Elizalde , Yixin Lin

Children can use the statistical regularities of their environment to learn word meanings, a mechanism known as cross-situational learning. We take a computational approach to investigate how the information present during each observation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-02-23 Aida Nematzadeh , Barend Beekhuizen , Shanshan Huang , Suzanne Stevenson

In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-02-05 Dusko Pavlovic , Peter-Michael Seidel , Muzamil Yahia

Ranking and comparing items is crucial for collecting information about preferences in many areas, from marketing to politics. The Mallows rank model is among the most successful approaches to analyse rank data, but its computational…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-28 Valeria Vitelli , Øystein Sørensen , Marta Crispino , Arnoldo Frigessi , Elja Arjas

We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Therese C. Biedl , Erik D. Demaine , Martin L. Demaine , Rudolf Fleischer , Lars Jacobsen , J. Ian Munro

Similarity functions measure how comparable pairs of elements are, and play a key role in a wide variety of applications, e.g., notions of Individual Fairness abiding by the seminal paradigm of Dwork et al., as well as Clustering problems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Leonidas Tsepenekas , Ivan Brugere , Freddy Lecue , Daniele Magazzeni

Probabilistic graphical models allow us to encode a large probability distribution as a composition of smaller ones. It is oftentimes the case that we are interested in incorporating in the model the idea that some of these smaller…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-17 Jesus Cerquides

This document presents the rules of a tactical two-player board game which is inspired by spin glasses. The aim is, while placing bonds and spins, to achieve a majority of the spins facing the chosen direction of each player. The game has…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-12-16 Alexander K. Hartmann

In probability theory, there is a tendency to treat one random variable with a given distribution as being just as good as any other. By and large this is fine because probability is (mostly) concerned with distributional properties of…

Probability · Mathematics 2013-01-31 Douglas Rizzolo

While internet-scale data often comes in pairs (e.g., audio/image, image/text), we often want to perform inferences over modalities unseen together in the training data (e.g., audio/text). Empirically, this can often be addressed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Yongwei Che , Benjamin Eysenbach

It is known that for the 2n-step symmetric simple random walk on Z, two events have the same probability if and only if their sets of paths have the same cardinality. In this article, we construct two kinds of bijections between sets of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-07-13 Sai Song , Qiang Yao

Bundling, the practice of jointly selling two or more products at a discount, is a widely used strategy in industry and a well examined concept in academia. Historically, the focus has been on theoretical studies in the context of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Madhav Kumar , Dean Eckles , Sinan Aral

We consider a bandit problem over a graph where the rewards are not directly observed. Instead, the decision maker can compare two nodes and receive (stochastic) information pertaining to the difference in their value. The graph structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-09-13 Dotan Di Castro , Claudio Gentile , Shie Mannor

We consider online variations of the Pandora's box problem (Weitzman. 1979), a standard model for understanding issues related to the cost of acquiring information for decision-making. Our problem generalizes both the classic Pandora's box…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-01-31 Hossein Esfandiari , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Brendan Lucier , Michael Mitzenmacher

Let $\pi_n$ be a uniformly chosen random permutation on $[n]$. Using an analysis of the probability that two overlapping consecutive $k$-permutations are order isomorphic, we show that the expected number of distinct consecutive patterns in…

First-order statistics of scattered light is described using the representation of probability density cloud which visualizes a two-dimensional distribution for complex amplitude. The geometric parameters of the cloud are studied in detail…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2017-08-02 Natalia Yaitskova

We consider in this paper an urn and ball problem with replacement, where balls are with different colors and are drawn uniformly from a unique urn. The numbers of balls with a given color are i.i.d. random variables with a heavy tailed…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2009-06-20 Christine Fricker , Fabrice Guillemin , Philippe Robert

We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary choice tasks as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2015-05-14 Drew Fudenberg , Philipp Strack , Tomasz Strzalecki

There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…

Applications · Statistics 2015-08-21 Albrecht Zimmermann

This paper studies the asymptotic behaviors of the pairwise angles among n randomly and uniformly distributed unit vectors in R^p as the number of points n -> infinity, while the dimension p is either fixed or growing with n. For both…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2013-06-04 Tony Cai , Jianqing Fan , Tiefeng Jiang