Related papers: A lower bound for the $n$-queens problem

In Martin Gardner's October, 1976 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American, he posed the following problem: "What is the smallest number of [queens] you can put on a board of side n such that no [queen] can be added without creating…

We construct irreducible balanced non-transitive sets of $n$-sided dice for any positive integer $n$, which was raised in \cite[Question 5.2]{SS17}. One main tool of the construction is to study so-called fair sets of dice. Furthermore, we…

In this paper, we show that the solution to a large class of "tiling" problems is given by a polynomial sequence of binomial type. More specifically, we show that the number of ways to place a fixed set of polyominos on an $n\times n$…

A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…

The queen's graph $Q_{m \times n}$ has the squares of the $m \times n$ chessboard as its vertices; two squares are adjacent if they are in the same row, column, or diagonal of the board. A set $D$ of squares of $Q_{m \times n}$ is a…

Chess graphs encode the moves that a particular chess piece can make on an $m\times n$ chessboard. We study through these graphs through the lens of chip-firing games and graph gonality. We provide upper and lower bounds for the gonality of…

In an ordinary quantum algorithm the gates are applied in a fixed order on the systems. The introduction of indefinite causal structures allows to relax this constraint and control the order of the gates with an additional quantum state. It…

Traditionally, the problem of apportioning the seats of a legislative body has been viewed as a one-shot process with no dynamic considerations. While this approach is reasonable for some settings, dynamic aspects play an important role in…

Some preliminary results are reported on the equivalence of any n-queens problem with the roots of a Boolean valued quadratic form via a generic dimensional reduction scheme. It is then proven that the solutions set is encoded in the…

We investigate the structure of the currencies (systems of coins) for which the greedy change-making algorithm always finds an optimal solution (that is, a one with minimum number of coins). We present a series of necessary conditions that…

In the Online Machine Covering problem jobs, defined by their sizes, arrive one by one and have to be assigned to $m$ parallel and identical machines, with the goal of maximizing the load of the least-loaded machine. In this work, we study…

The semi-random graph process is a single player game in which the player is initially presented an empty graph on $n$ vertices. In each round, a vertex $u$ is presented to the player independently and uniformly at random. The player then…

There has been a recent explosion in the size of stored data, partially due to advances in storage technology, and partially due to the growing popularity of cloud-computing and the vast quantities of data generated. This motivates the need…

We empirically analyze a simple heuristic for large sparse set cover problems. It uses the weighted greedy algorithm as a basic building block. By multiplicative updates of the weights attached to the elements, the greedy solution is…

Consider a graph with n nodes and m edges, independent edge weights and lengths, and arbitrary distance demands for node pairs. The spanner problem asks for a minimum-weight subgraph that satisfies these demands via sufficiently short paths…

Consider the Hitting Set problem where, for a given universe $\mathcal{X} = \left\{ 1, ... , n \right\}$ and a collection of subsets $\mathcal{S}_1, ... , \mathcal{S}_m$, one seeks to identify the smallest subset of $\mathcal{X}$ which has…

In many prediction problems, it is not uncommon that the number of variables used to construct a forecast is of the same order of magnitude as the sample size, if not larger. We then face the problem of constructing a prediction in the…

Variational Quantum Algorithms are a vital part of quantum computing. It is a blend of quantum and classical methods for tackling tough problems in machine learning, chemistry, and combinatorial optimization. Yet as these algorithms scale…

We present two new quantum algorithms that either find a triangle (a copy of $K_{3}$) in an undirected graph $G$ on $n$ nodes, or reject if $G$ is triangle free. The first algorithm uses combinatorial ideas with Grover Search and makes…

We propose a sorting-based greedy algorithm called SortedGreedy[m] for approximately solving the offline version of the d-choice weighted balls-into-bins problem where the number of choices for each ball is equal to the number of bins. We…