Related papers: The slowest coupon collector's problem
In the gift exchange game there are n players and n wrapped gifts. When a player's number is called, that person can either choose one of the remaining wrapped gifts, or can "steal" a gift from someone who has already unwrapped it, subject…
In this paper, we introduce online knapsack problems with a resource buffer. In the problems, we are given a knapsack with capacity $1$, a buffer with capacity $R\ge 1$, and items that arrive one by one. Each arriving item has to be taken…
We introduce and study a novel generalization of the classical Knapsack Problem (KP), called the Colored Knapsack Problem (CKP). In this problem, the items are partitioned into classes of colors and the packed items need to be ordered such…
Consider the following game played by two players, called Waiter and Client, on the edges of $K_n$ (where $n$ is divisible by $3$). Initially, all the edges are unclaimed. In each round, Waiter picks two yet unclaimed edges. Client then…
We consider repeated multi-unit auctions with uniform pricing, which are widely used in practice for allocating goods such as carbon licenses. In each round, $K$ identical units of a good are sold to a group of buyers that have valuations…
In the Colored Bin Packing problem a sequence of items of sizes up to $1$ arrives to be packed into bins of unit capacity. Each item has one of $c\geq 2$ colors and an additional constraint is that we cannot pack two items of the same color…
We consider stamps with different values (denominations) and same dimensions, and an envelope with a fixed maximum number of stamp positions. The local postage stamp problem is to find the smallest value that cannot be realized by the sum…
A simple problem is studied in which there are N boxes and a prize known to be in one of the boxes. Furthermore, the probability that the prize is in any box is given. It is desired to find the prize with minimal expected work, where it…
This article explores the intersection of the Coupon Collector's Problem and the Orthogonal Matrix Factorization (OMF) problem. Specifically, we derive bounds on the minimum number of columns $p$ (in $\mathbf{X}$) required for the OMF…
We study several variants of the classical card game war. As anyone who played this game knows, the game can take some time to terminate, but it usually does. Here, we analyze a number of asymptotic variants of the game, where the number of…
Conferences such as FUN with Algorithms routinely buy goodies (e.g., t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc) for their attendees. Often, said goodies come in different types, varying by color or design, and organizers need to decide how many goodies of…
Optimal stopping problems give rise to random distributions describing how many applicants the decision-maker will sample or interview before choosing one, a quantity sometimes referred to as the search time or process duration. This…
In this paper we furnish quality certificates for the Divide-and-Conquer method solving the 0-1 Knapsack Problem: the worst case scenario and estimates for the expected performance. The probabilistic setting is given and the main random…
We extend the standard online worst-case model to accommodate past experience which is available to the online player in many practical scenarios. We do this by revealing a random sample of the adversarial input to the online player ahead…
We investigate the structure of the currencies (systems of coins) for which the greedy change-making algorithm always finds an optimal solution (that is, a one with minimum number of coins). We present a series of necessary conditions that…
The Fighter problem with discrete ammunition is studied. An aircraft (fighter) equipped with $n$ anti-aircraft missiles is intercepted by enemy airplanes, the appearance of which follows a homogeneous Poisson process with known intensity.…
The cocktail party problem refers to the famous selective attention problem of how to find out the signal of each individual sources from signals of a number of detectors. In the classical cocktail party problem, the signal of each source…
A variant of the well-known Set Covering Problem is studied in this paper, where subsets of a collection have to be selected, and pairwise conflicts among subsets of items exist. The selection of each subset has a cost, and the inclusion of…
We consider several combinatorial optimization problems which combine the classic shop scheduling problems, namely open shop scheduling or job shop scheduling, and the shortest path problem. The objective of the obtained problem is to…
Waiter-Client games are played on some hypergraph $(X,\mathcal{F})$, where $\mathcal{F}$ denotes the family of winning sets. For some bias $b$, during each round of such a game Waiter offers to Client $b+1$ elements of $X$, of which Client…