Related papers: 100 prisoners and a lightbulb -- looking back
In the well-studied Stable Roommates problem, we seek a stable matching of agents into pairs, where no two agents prefer each other over their assigned partners. However, some instances of this problem are unsolvable, lacking any stable…
Differences between men and women have intrigued generations of social scientists, who have found that the two sexes behave differently in settings requiring competition, risk taking, altruism, honesty, as well as many others. Yet, little…
A formal axiomatic mathematical framework for Boolos' Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever is presented and two theorems about its solvability are proved. By strictly following Boolos' instructions (in particular, the requirement that all gods are…
In the late 90's, Tom Wolff introduced the circle tangency counting problem in his expository article on the Kakeya conjecture. For collections of well-spaced circles, we break the $N^{3/2}$-barrier, proving that a set of $N$ well-spaced…
A typical polling system consists of a number of queues, attended by a single server in a fixed order. The vast majority of papers on polling systems focusses on Poisson arrivals, whereas very few results are available for general arrivals.…
The search of solutions of the Diophantine equation $x^3 + y^3 + z^3 = k$ for $k<1000$ has been extended with bounds of $|x|$, $|y|$ and $|z|$ up to $10^{15}$. The first solution for $k=74$ is reported. This only leaves $k=33$ and $k=42$…
"The hardest logic puzzle ever" presented by George Boolos became a target for philosophers and logicians who tried to modify it and make it even tougher. I propose further modification of the original puzzle where part of the available…
The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game that produces many counter-intuitive and complex behaviors in a social environment, based on very simple basic rules. It illustrates that cooperation can be a good thing even in a competitive world,…
Though suicide is a major public health problem in the US, machine learning methods are not commonly used to predict an individual's risk of attempting/committing suicide. In the present work, starting with an anonymized collection of…
The nature of binary black hole coalescence is the final, uncharted frontier of the relativistic Kepler problem. In the United States, binary black hole coalescence has been identified as a computational ``Grand Challenge'' whose solution…
Across languages, numeral systems vary widely in how they construct and combine numbers. While humans consistently learn to navigate this diversity, large language models (LLMs) struggle with linguistic-mathematical puzzles involving…
The Mailbox Problem was described and solved by Aguilera, Gafni, and Lamport in their 2010 DC paper with an algorithm that uses two flag registers that carry 14 values each. An interesting problem that they ask is whether there is a mailbox…
In 1979, Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a framework for sequential search with costly inspections. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in Pandora's box problem, particularly among researchers working at the…
We present a simple thought experiment in which a beam of light of a finite length (a light-pulse) enters a detection device that consists of a wave detector and a light bulb. We examine the experiment from the reference frame where the…
The paper studies the emergence and stability of cooperative behavior in populations of agents who interact among themselves in Prisoner's Dilemma games and who are allowed to choose their partners. The population is then subject to…
The finite colliding bullets problem is the following simple problem: consider a gun, whose barrel remains in a fixed direction; let $(V_i)_{1\le i\le n}$ be an i.i.d.\ family of random variables with uniform distribution on $[0,1]$; shoot…
We study a long-run persuasion problem where a long-lived Sender repeatedly interacts with a sequence of short-lived Receivers who may adopt a misspecified model for belief updating. The Sender commits to a stationary information structure,…
In his stimulating article on the reasons for two puzzling observations about the behaviour of interest rates, exchange rates and the rate of inflation, Charles Engel (2016) puts forward an explanation that rests on the concept of a…
The scheduling problem in Hurdle (1973) was formulated in a general form that simultaneously concerned the vehicle dispatching, circulating, fleet sizing, and patron queueing. As a constrained variational problem, it remains not fully…
Adapting methods introduced by Steven Smale, we describe good strategies for a symmetric version of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with n players.