Related papers: On non-adaptive majority problems of large query s…
We study two models of the Majority problem. We are given n balls and an unknown coloring of them with two colors. We can ask sets of balls of size k as queries, and in the so-called General Model the answer to a query shows if all the…
Suppose we are given a set of $n$ balls $\{b_1,\ldots,b_n\}$ each colored either red or blue in some way unknown to us. To find out some information about the colors, we can query any triple of balls $\{b_{i_1},b_{i_2},b_{i_3}\}$. As an…
Given a set of n balls each colored with a color, a ball is said to be majority, k-majority, plurality if its color class has size larger than half of the number of balls, has size at least k, has size larger than any other color class;…
Given a set of $n$ colored balls, a \textit{majority, non-minority or plurality ball} is one whose color class has size more than $n/2$, at least $n/2$ or larger than any other color class, respectively. We describe linear time algorithms…
Consider a bin containing $n$ balls colored with two colors. In a $k$-query, $k$ balls are selected by a questioner and the oracle's reply is related (depending on the computation model being considered) to the distribution of colors of the…
The Plurality problem - introduced by Aigner \cite{A2004} - has many variants. In this article we deal with the following version: suppose we are given $n$ balls, each of them colored by one of three colors. A \textit{plurality ball} is one…
The problem we are considering is the following. A colorblind player is given a set $B = \{b_1,b_2,...,b_N\}$ of $N$ colored balls. He knows that each ball is colored either red or green, and that there are less green balls (this will be…
In responding to a question on Math Stackexchange, the author formulated the problem of determining the number of strings of balls colored in most $n$ colors with a number $k$ of repeated colors. In this paper, we formulate the problem more…
The majority problem is a special case of the heavy hitters problem. Given a collection of coloured balls, the task is to identify the majority colour or state that no such colour exists. Whilst the special case of two-colours has been well…
Enumeration problems aim at outputting, without repetition, the set of solutions to a given problem instance. However, outputting the entire solution set may be prohibitively expensive if it is too big. In this case, outputting a small,…
Suppose that the vertices of a graph $G$ are colored with two colors in an unknown way. The color that occurs on more than half of the vertices is called the majority color (if it exists), and any vertex of this color is called a majority…
We consider the basic problem of learning an unknown partition of $n$ elements into at most $k$ sets using simple queries that reveal information about a small subset of elements. Our starting point is the well-studied pairwise same-set…
The problem of estimating the number $n$ of distinct keys of a large collection of $N$ data is well known in computer science. A classical algorithm is the adaptive sampling (AS). $n$ can be estimated by $R.2^D$, where $R$ is the final…
Various forms of sorting problems have been studied over the years. Recently, two kinds of sorting puzzle apps are popularized. In these puzzles, we are given a set of bins filled with colored units, balls or water, and some empty bins.…
The $k$-majority game is played with $n$ numbered balls, each coloured with one of two colours. It is given that there are at least $k$ balls of the majority colour, where $k$ is a fixed integer greater than $n/2$. On each turn the player…
We consider problems that can be solved by asking certain queries. The deterministic query complexity $D(P,n)$ of a problem $P$ is the smallest number of queries needed to ask in order to find the solution with an input of size $n$ (in the…
We give a new deterministic algorithm that non-adaptively learns a hidden hypergraph from edge-detecting queries. All previous non-adaptive algorithms either run in exponential time or have non-optimal query complexity. We give the first…
We study colored coverage and clustering problems. Here, we are given a colored point set where the points are covered by (unknown) $k$ clusters, which are monochromatic (i.e., all the points covered by the same cluster, have the same…
We study the problem of sorting under incomplete information, when queries are used to resolve uncertainties. Each of $n$ data items has an unknown value, which is known to lie in a given interval. We can pay a query cost to learn the…
We consider the problem of quantitative group testing (QGT), where the goal is to recover a sparse binary vector from aggregate subset-sum queries: each query selects a subset of indices and returns the sum of those entries.…