Related papers: A Simple Search Problem
We propose a new approach to solve the classical Monty Hall problem in its general form. The solution is based on basic tools of probability theory, by defining three elementary events which decompose the sample space into a partition. The…
We show that quantum search can be used to compute the hardness to round an elementary function, that is, to determine the minimum working precision required to compute the values of an elementary function correctly rounded to a target…
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…
The concept of Shannon entropy of random variables was generalized to measurable functions in general, and to simple functions with finite values in particular. It is shown that the information measure of a function is related to the time…
Given an unordered array of $N$ elements drawn from a totally ordered set and an integer $k$ in the range from $1$ to $N$, in the classic selection problem the task is to find the $k$-th smallest element in the array. We study the…
We study the problem of computing maximin share guarantees, a recently introduced fairness notion. Given a set of $n$ agents and a set of goods, the maximin share of a single agent is the best that she can guarantee to herself, if she would…
The goal of this work is to prove an analogue of a recent result of Harper on almost sure lower bounds of random multiplicative functions, in a setting that can be thought of as a simplified function field analogue. It answers a question…
The idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)science over recent decades. Here I present a…
Matrix Completion is the problem of recovering an unknown real-valued low-rank matrix from a subsample of its entries. Important recent results show that the problem can be solved efficiently under the assumption that the unknown matrix is…
Suppose we observe a Poisson process in real time for which the intensity may take on two possible values $\lambda_0$ and $\lambda_1$. Suppose further that the priori probability of the true intensity is not given. We solve a minimax…
We revisit the knapsack-secretary problem (Babaioff et al.; APPROX 2007), a generalization of the classic secretary problem in which items have different sizes and multiple items may be selected if their total size does not exceed the…
We present a new inductive rule for verifying lower bounds on expected values of random variables after execution of probabilistic loops as well as on their expected runtimes. Our rule is simple in the sense that loop body semantics need to…
We study a two-dimensional generalization of the classical Bin Packing problem, denoted as 2D Demand Bin Packing. In this context, each bin is a horizontal timeline, and rectangular tasks (representing electric appliances or computational…
We present and examine a result related to uncertainty reasoning, namely that a certain plausibility space of Cox's type can be uniquely embedded in a minimal ordered field. This, although a purely mathematical result, can be claimed to…
Developing new ways to estimate probabilities can be valuable for science, statistics, and engineering. By considering the information content of different output patterns, recent work invoking algorithmic information theory has shown that…
Tournaments are widely used models to represent pairwise dominance between candidates, alternatives, or teams. We study the problem of providing certified explanations for why a candidate appears among the winners under various tournament…
The purpose of this article is to examine and limit the conditions in which the P complexity class could be equivalent to the NP complexity class. Proof is provided by demonstrating that as the number of clauses in a NP-complete problem…
In the (1-dimensional) bin packing problem, we are asked to pack all the given items into bins, each of capacity one, so that the number of non-empty bins is minimized. Zhu~[Chaos, Solitons \& Fractals 2016] proposed an approximation…
We give a unified treatment of the limit, as the size tends to infinity, of simply generated random trees, including both the well-known result in the standard case of critical Galton--Watson trees and similar but less well-known results in…
This work proposes a view of probability as a relative measure rather than an absolute one. To demonstrate this concept, we focus on finite outcome spaces and develop three fundamental axioms that establish requirements for relative…