Related papers: A More Malicious Maitre d'
Bob cuts a pizza into slices of not necessarily equal size and shares it with Alice by alternately taking turns. One slice is taken in each turn. The first turn is Alice's. She may choose any of the slices. In all other turns only those…
Given an undirected graph representing similarities between a set of items and an additive measure evaluating the items, we treat the position of a special subset of items in an ordinal ranking through a collection of combinatorial…
Machine teaching often involves the creation of an optimal (typically minimal) dataset to help a model (referred to as the `student') achieve specific goals given by a teacher. While abundant in the continuous domain, the studies on the…
In this paper we investigate the problem of order batching for picker routing. Our approach is applicable to warehouses (storage areas) arranged in the standard rectangular grid layout, so with parallel aisles and two or more cross-aisles.…
Among the most important variants of the traveling salesman problem (TSP) are those relaxing the constraint that every locus should necessarily get visited, rather taking into account a revenue (prize) for visiting customers. In the…
We study a natural combinatorial pricing problem for sequentially arriving buyers with equal budgets. Each buyer is interested in exactly one pair of items and purchases this pair if and only if, upon arrival, both items are still available…
We consider apictorial edge-matching puzzles, in which the goal is to arrange a collection of puzzle pieces with colored edges so that the colors match along the edges of adjacent pieces. We devise an algebraic representation for this…
In 1967, Klarner proposed a problem concerning the existence of reflecting $n$-queens configurations. The problem considers the feasibility of placing $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on the reflecting chessboard, an $n\times n$ chessboard…
In card games, in casino games with multiple decks of cards and in cryptography, one is sometimes faced with the following problem: how can a human (as opposed to a computer) shuffle a large deck of cards? The procedure we study is to break…
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,…
We are given suppliers and customers, and a set of tables. Every evening of the forthcoming days, there will be a dinner. Each customer must eat with each supplier exactly once, but two suppliers may meet at most once at a table. The number…
We propose an extremely versatile approach to address a large family of matrix nearness problems, possibly with additional linear constraints. Our method is based on splitting a matrix nearness problem into two nested optimization problems,…
Many discrete optimization problems amount to selecting a feasible set of edges of least weight. We consider in this paper the context of spatial graphs where the positions of the vertices are uncertain and belong to known uncertainty sets.…
This paper presents several new tractability results for planning based on macros. We describe an algorithm that optimally solves planning problems in a class that we call inverted tree reducible, and is provably tractable for several…
We study the minimum backlog problem (MBP). This online problem arises, e.g., in the context of sensor networks. We focus on two main variants of MBP. The discrete MBP is a 2-person game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The player is initially…
We study the problem of finding a tour of $n$ points in which every edge is long. More precisely, we wish to find a tour that visits every point exactly once, maximizing the length of the shortest edge in the tour. The problem is known as…
The author presents two tricks to accelerate depth-first search algorithms for a class of combinatorial puzzle problems, such as tiling a tray by a fixed set of polyominoes. The first trick is to implement each assumption of the search with…
We present new theoretical algorithms that sums the n-ary comparators output in order to get the permutation indices in order to sort a sequence. By analysing the parallel ranking algorithm, we found that the special comparators number of…
The classical Monge-Kantorovich (MK) problem as originally posed is concerned with how best to move a pile of soil or rubble to an excavation or fill with the least amount of work relative to some cost function. When the cost is given by…
The concept of walkable urban development has gained increased attention due to its public health, economic, and environmental sustainability benefits. Unfortunately, land zoning and historic under-investment have resulted in spatial…