Related papers: The inspection paradox in stochastic resetting
When both slits of the double slit experiment are open, closing one paradoxically increases the detection rate at some points on the detection screen. Feynman famously warned that temptation to "understand" such a puzzling feature only…
Cerny's conjecture is a longstanding open problem in automata theory. We study two different concepts, which allow to approach it from a new angle. The first one is the triple rendezvous time, i.e., the length of the shortest word mapping…
Research in transportation frequently involve modelling and predicting attributes of events that occur at regular intervals. The event could be arrival of a bus at a bus stop, the volume of a traffic at a particular point, the demand at a…
The reversibility and recurrence paradoxes are key issues that have been left unsolved in researches on the foundation of thermodynamics since the 19th century. This article shows that (1) the reversibility paradox can be overcome if we pay…
The systematic biases seen in people's probability judgments are typically taken as evidence that people do not reason about probability using the rules of probability theory, but instead use heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable…
This paper collects some reflections about an apparent incongruity between the usual (third-person) understanding of the probability of an event calculated for an extended period of time in the future (e.g., the expected probability of a…
This article examines the subtle relationship between chaos and randomness, two concepts that, although they refer to seemingly unpredictable phenomenon, are based on fundamentally different principles. Chaos manifests in deterministic…
In the rod and hole paradox as described by Rindler (1961 Am. J. Phys. 29 365-6), a rigid rod moves at high speed over a table towards a hole of the same size. Observations from the inertial frames of the rod and slot are widely different.…
Nonlinear dynamical systems subjected to a combination of noise and time-varying forcing can exhibit sudden changes, critical transitions or tipping points where large or rapid dynamic effects arise from changes in a parameter that are…
The effect of surprisal on processing difficulty has been a central topic of investigation in psycholinguistics. Here, we use eyetracking data to examine three language processing regimes that are common in daily life but have not been…
Gate holding reduces congestion by reducing the number of aircraft present on the airport surface at any time, while not starving the runway. Because some departing flights are held at gates, there is a possibility that arriving flights…
It's a situation everyone dreads. A road is down to one lane for repairs. Traffic is let through one way until the backlog clears and then traffic is let through the other way to clear that backlog and so on. When stuck in a very long queue…
I model a rational agent who experiences endogenous deadline pressure in the face of a fixed future deadline. The agent holds a resource stock, and opportunities to spend resources arise randomly according to a Poisson process. When the…
Astrophysical paradoxes are the paradoxes of physics. The main motivation of a formulated paradox is clearly recognized in the scientific environment because the phenomenon of a paradox itself has become interesting. There is an explanation…
A number of problems in physics, mathematics, and philosophy involve observers in given situations which lead to debates about whether observer-specific information should affect the probability for some outcome or hypothesis. Our purpose…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
We consider an extension of the zero-range process to the case where the hop rate depends on the state of both departure and arrival sites. We recover the misanthrope and the target process as special cases for which the probability of the…
We revisit the familiar scenario involving two parties in relative motion, in which Alice stays at rest while Bob goes on a journey at speed $\beta c$ along an arbitrary trajectory and reunites with Alice after a certain period of time. It…
The notion of drift refers to the phenomenon that the distribution, which is underlying the observed data, changes over time. Albeit many attempts were made to deal with drift, formal notions of drift are application-dependent and…
We follow the time sequence of binary elastic collisions in a small collection of hard-core particles. Intervals between the collisions are characterized by the numbers of collisions of different pairs in a given time. It was shown…