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Hackenbush is a two player game, played on a graph with coloured edges where players take it in turns to remove edges of their own colour. It has been shown that under normal play rules Red-Blue Hackenbush (all edges are coloured either red…
The concept of nimbers--a.k.a. Grundy-values or nim-values--is fundamental to combinatorial game theory. Nimbers provide a complete characterization of strategic interactions among impartial games in their disjunctive sums as well as the…
The move-minimizing puzzles presented here are certain types of one-player combinatorial games that are shown to have explicit solutions whenever they can be encoded in a certain way as diamond-colored modular or distributive lattices. Our…
We give a signed puzzle rule to compute Schubert coefficients. The rule is based on a careful analysis of Knutson's recurrence arXiv:math/0306304. We use the rule to prove polynomiality of the sums of Schubert coefficients with bounded…
Subset sum is a very old and fundamental problem in theoretical computer science. In this problem, $n$ items with weights $w_1, w_2, w_3, \ldots, w_n$ are given as input and the goal is to find out if there is a subset of them whose weights…
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…
Games on recursive game graphs can be used to reason about the control flow of sequential programs with recursion. In games over recursive game graphs, the most natural notion of strategy is the modular strategy, i.e., a strategy that is…
A binary constraint system game is a two-player one-round non-local game defined by a system of Boolean constraints. The game has a perfect quantum strategy if and only if the constraint system has a quantum satisfying assignment [R. Cleve…
Let $p_1,p_2,\dots,p_n, a_1,a_2,\dots,a_n \in \N$, $x_1,x_2,\dots,x_n \in \R$, and denote the $k$th periodized Bernoulli polynomial by $\B_k(x)$. We study expressions of the form \[ \sum_{h \bmod{a_k}} \ \prod_{\substack{i=1\\ i\not=k}}^{n}…
In order to obtain the best-known guarantees, algorithms are traditionally tailored to the particular problem we want to solve. Two recent developments, the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC) and the Sum-of-Squares (SOS) method, surprisingly…
One-clock priced timed games is a class of two-player, zero-sum, continuous-time games that was defined and thoroughly studied in previous works. We show that one-clock priced timed games can be solved in time m 12^n n^(O(1)), where n is…
A classical question of propositional logic is one of the shortest proof of a tautology. A related fundamental problem is to determine the relative efficiency of standard proof systems, where the relative complexity is measured using the…
We derive a combinatorial multisum expression for the number $D(n,k)$ of partitions of $n$ with Durfee square of order $k$. An immediate corollary is therefore a combinatorial formula for $p(n)$, the number of partitions of $n$. We then…
A chain is an ordering of the integers 1 to n such that adjacent pairs have sums of a particular form, such as squares, cubes, triangular numbers, pentagonal numbers, or Fibonacci numbers. For example 4 1 2 3 5 form a Fibonacci chain while…
Interest in the random-order model (ROM) leads us to initiate a study of utilizing random-order arrivals to extract random bits with the goal of derandomizing algorithms. Besides producing simple algorithms, simulating random bits through…
The crossword-like patterns of tiles in Scrabble form connected graphs of occupied sites on a square lattice. We find the most structureless description that reproduces means and covariances observed in real Scrabble games by adapting a…
The n-th Delannoy number and the n-th Schr\"oder number given by $D_n=\sum_{k=0}^n\binom{n}{k}\binom{n+k}{k}$ and $S_n=\sum_{k=0}^n\binom{n}{k}\binom{n+k}{k}/(k+1)$ respectively arise naturally from enumerative combinatorics. Let p be an…
We use a variation of the Circle Method, along with the Saddle Point Method, to obtain an asymptotic formula for the number of partitions of a number n into integers which are sums of two squares. Unlike previous work on partitions into…
A four-term recurrence relation for squared spherical Bessel functions is shown to yield closed-form expressions for several types of finite weighted sums of these functions. The resulting sum rules, which may contain an arbitrarily large…
We prove combinatorially that the parity of the number of domino tilings of a region is equal to the parity of the number of domino tilings of a particular subregion. Using this result we can resolve the holey square conjecture. We…