Related papers: A More Malicious Maitre d'
In this paper we study a variant of the Malicious Ma\^{i}tre d' problem. This problem, attributed to computer scientist Rob Pike in Peter Winkler's book "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection", involves seating diners around a…
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…
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…
We consider the problem of maximizing the number of people that a dining room can accommodate provided that the chairs belonging to different tables are socially distant. We introduce an optimization model that incorporates several…
Given two players alternately picking pieces of a pizza sliced by radial cuts, in such a way that after the first piece is taken every subsequent chosen piece is adjacent to some previously taken piece, we provide a strategy for the…
We address the problem of enumeration of seating arrangements of married couples around a circular table such that no spouses sit next to each other and no k consecutive persons are of the same gender. While the case of k=2 corresponds to…
We give a solution of the following combinatorial problem: "Let one from $n$ married couples in the m\'enage problem (see Problem 1) be a couple of a known mathematician $M$ and his wife. After the ladies are seated at every other chair,…
The muffin problem asks us to divide $m$ muffins into pieces and assign each of those pieces to one of $s$ students so that the sizes of the pieces assigned to each student total $m/s$, with the objective being to maximize the size of the…
The problem of cleaning a messy table using Deep Neural Networks is a very interesting problem in both social and industrial robotics. This project focuses on the social application of this technology. A neural network model that is capable…
In his book "Mathematical Mind-Benders", Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: "[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a…
The Tsetlin library is a well-studied Markov chain on the symmetric group $S_n$. It has stationary distribution $\pi(\sigma)$ the Luce model, a nonuniform distribution on $S_n$, which appears in psychology, horse race betting, and…
The distributed matrix multiplication problem with an unknown number of stragglers is considered, where the goal is to efficiently and flexibly obtain the product of two massive matrices by distributing the computation across N servers.…
Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…
Magic: the Gathering is a popular and famously complicated card game about magical combat. Recently, several authors including Chatterjee and Ibsen-Jensen (2016) and Churchill, Biderman, and Herrick (2019) have investigated the…
The profitable tour problem (PTP) is a well-known NP-hard routing problem searching for a tour visiting a subset of customers while maximizing profit as the difference between total revenue collected and traveling costs. PTP is known to be…
We investigate a disordered variant of Pitman's Chinese restaurant process where tables carry i.i.d. weights. Incoming customers choose to sit at an occupied table with a probability proportional to the product of its occupancy and its…
We present how we formalize the waiting tables task in a restaurant as a robot planning problem. This formalization was used to test our recently developed algorithms that allow for optimal planning for achieving multiple independent tasks…
Tantrix is a puzzle to make a loop by connecting lines drawn on hexagonal tiles, and the objective of this research is to solve it by a computer. For this purpose, we give a problem setting of solving Tantrix as arranging tiles in an…
The Travelling Thief Problem (TTP) is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem that attracts many scholars. The TTP interconnects two well-known NP-hard problems: the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the 0-1 Knapsack Problem…
A king invites n couples to sit around a round table with 2n+1 seats. For each couple, the king decides a prescribed distance d between 1 and n which the two spouses have to be seated from each other (distance d means that they are…