Related papers: An Impossible Asylum
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
Abductive reasoning is inference to the most plausible explanation. For example, if Jenny finds her house in a mess when she returns from work, and remembers that she left a window open, she can hypothesize that a thief broke into her house…
The napkin problem was first posed by John H. Conway, and written up as a `toughie' in "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection," by Peter Winkler. To paraphrase Winkler's book, there is a banquet dinner to be served at a…
The 'Problematic Paper Screener' (PPS, WCRI'22, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.04895) flagged 12k+ questionable articles featuring tortured phrases, such as 'glucose bigotry' instead of 'glucose intolerance.' It daily screens the…
We study variants of the Optimal Refugee Resettlement problem where a set $F$ of refugee families need to be allocated to a set $L$ of possible places of resettlement in a feasible and optimal way. Feasibility issues emerge from the…
I discuss how five reasonably sounding assumptions lead to a dilemma -- the Page-time paradox -- , which appears to challenge a conventional statistical mechanical underpinning of black hole thermodynamics. By inspecting the conceptual…
The Connections puzzle published each day by the New York Times tasks players with dividing a bank of sixteen words into four groups of four words that each relate to a common theme. Solving the puzzle requires both common linguistic…
The problem of the malicious ma\^{i}tre d' is introduced and solved by Peter Winkler in his book Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection [1]. This problem is about a ma\^{i}tre d' seating diners around a table, trying to maximize…
This is a typeset version of Alan Turing's Second World War research paper \textit{The Applications of Probability to Cryptography}. A companion paper \textit{Paper on Statistics of Repetitions} is also available in typeset form from arXiv…
The Monty Hall problem is notorious for its deceptive simplicity. Although today it is widely used as a provocative thought experiment to introduce Bayesian thinking to students of probability, in the not so distant past it was rejected by…
Recent work arXiv.2310.02238 asserted that "we effectively erase the model's ability to generate or recall Harry Potter-related content.'' This claim is shown to be overbroad. A small experiment of less than a dozen trials led to repeated…
I consider the puzzles arising from four interrelated problems involving `anthropic' reasoning, and in particular the `Self-Sampling Assumption' (SSA) - that one should reason as if one were randomly chosen from the set of all observers in…
See hep-th/9903228.
We revisit Smullyan's paper ``Truth and Provability'' (2013) for three purposes. First, we introduce the notion of Smullyan models to give a precise definition for Smullyan's framework discussed in that paper. Second, we clarify the…
The Frankl conjecture, also known as the union-closed sets conjecture, states that in any finite non-empty union-closed family, there exists an element in at least half of the sets. From an optimization point of view, one could instead…
We give a new proof for Godel's second incompleteness theorem, based on Kolmogorov complexity, Chaitin's incompleteness theorem, and an argument that resembles the surprise examination paradox. We then go the other way around and suggest…
Tablut is a complete-knowledge, deterministic, and asymmetric board game, which has not been solved nor properly studied yet. In this work, its rules and characteristics are presented, then a study on its complexity is reported. An upper…
We recently considered the task of summoning an unknown quantum state and proved necessary and sufficient conditions for Alice to be able to guarantee to complete the task when there may be several possible calls, of which she need only…
We investigate some versions of the famous 100 prisoner problem for the infinite case, where there are infinitely many prisoners and infinitely many boxes with labels. In this case, many questions can be asked about the admissible steps of…
This article is one of three highly influential articles on the topology of manifolds written by Robert D. Edwards in the 1970's but never published. It presents the initial solutions of the fabled Double Suspension Conjecture. (The other…