Related papers: The slowest coupon collector's problem
This article considers a problem arising from a two-player game based on the classical secretary problem. First, Player 1 selects one object from a sequence as in the secretary problem. All of the other objects are then presented to Player…
We consider a class of zero-sum search games in which a Hider hides one or more target among a set of $n$ boxes. The boxes may require differing amount of time to search, and detection may be imperfect, so that there is a certain…
Carpooling service is an effective solution to balance the limited number of taxicabs and the soaring demands from users, Thus, how to motivate more passengers to participate in carpooling is essential, especially in extreme weather or in…
We revisit a version of the classic occupancy scheme, where balls are thrown until almost all boxes receive a given number of balls. Special cases are widely known as coupon-collectors and dixie cup problems. We show that as the number of…
To approximate the trajectories of a stochastic process by the solution of some differential equation is widely used in the fields of probability, computer science and combinatorics. In this paper, the convergence of coupon collecting…
This paper gives an algebraic proof of the correctness of Von Schelling formula for the probability of the coupon collector problem waiting time for non-uniform distributions and partial collections. It introduces a theorem on sums of…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
Many practical search problems concern the search for multiple hidden objects or agents, such as earthquake survivors. In such problems, knowing only the list of possible locations, the Searcher needs to find all the hidden objects by…
We introduce a natural variant of weighted voting games, which we refer to as k-Prize Weighted Voting Games. Such games consist of n players with weights, and k prizes, of possibly differing values. The players form coalitions, and the i-th…
Online knapsack problem is considered, where items arrive in a sequential fashion that have two attributes; value and weight. Each arriving item has to be accepted or rejected on its arrival irrevocably. The objective is to maximize the sum…
The Bin Packing Problem involves efficiently packing items into a limited number of bins without exceeding their capacity. In this paper, we try to answer a specific question in this field. Mathematically the combinatorial optimization…
An unceasing problem of our prevailing society is the fair division of goods. The problem of proportional cake cutting focuses on dividing a heterogeneous and divisible resource, the cake, among $n$ players who value pieces according to…
This paper deals with a problem in which two players share a previously sliced pizza and try to eat as much amount of pizza as they can. It takes time to eat each piece of pizza and both players eat pizza at the same rate. One is allowed to…
We study the two-player coupon-collector competition in which two independent collectors draw one coupon each per round from a set of $d$ equally likely coupon types. Myers and Wilf gave finite formulae for several two-player events and…
A query game is a pair of a set $Q$ of queries and a set $\mathcal{F}$ of functions, or codewords $f:Q\rightarrow \mathbb{Z}.$ We think of this as a two-player game. One player, Codemaker, picks a hidden codeword $f\in \mathcal{F}$. The…
We consider the following variant of the classic collector's problem: The family of coupon probabilities is the mixing of two subfamilies one of which is the \textit{uniform} family, while the other belongs to the well known \textit{Zipf…
Transferring knowledge across a sequence of related tasks is an important challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite much encouraging empirical evidence, there has been little theoretical analysis. In this paper, we study a class of…
Consider QBF, the Quantified Boolean Formula problem, as a combinatorial game ruleset. The problem is rephrased as determining the winner of the game where two opposing players take turns assigning values to boolean variables. In this…
An unknown positive number of items arrive at independent uniformly distributed times in the interval [0,1] to a selector, whose task is to pick online the last one. We show that under the assumption of an adversary determining the number…
We consider the $k$-prize-collecting Steiner tree problem. An instance is composed of an integer $k$ and a graph $G$ with costs on edges and penalties on vertices. The objective is to find a tree spanning at least $k$ vertices which…