Related papers: The change-making problem for six coin values and …
A bipartite graph $G(U,V;E)$ that admits a perfect matching is given. One player imposes a permutation $\pi$ over $V$, the other player imposes a permutation $\sigma$ over $U$. In the greedy matching algorithm, vertices of $U$ arrive in…
Coins are frequently used in everyday life at various places like in banks, grocery stores, supermarkets, automated weighing machines, vending machines etc. So, there is a basic need to automate the counting and sorting of coins. For this…
Given a dollar, how many ways are there to make change using pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters? What if you are given a different amount of money? What if you use different coin denominations? This is a well known problem and formulas…
We generalize the well-known Coupon Collector Problem (CCP) in combinatorics. Our problem is to find the minimum and expected number of draws, with replacement, required to recover $n$ distinctly labeled coupons, with each draw consisting…
The 2048 game involves tiles labeled with powers of two that can be merged to form bigger powers of two; variants of the same puzzle involve similar merges of other tile values. We analyze the maximum score achievable in these games by…
Consider the Hitting Set problem where, for a given universe $\mathcal{X} = \left\{ 1, ... , n \right\}$ and a collection of subsets $\mathcal{S}_1, ... , \mathcal{S}_m$, one seeks to identify the smallest subset of $\mathcal{X}$ which has…
In the Shortest Common Superstring problem (SCS), one needs to find the shortest superstring for a set of strings. While SCS is NP-hard and MAX-SNP-hard, the Greedy Algorithm "choose two strings with the largest overlap; merge them; repeat"…
We study the problem of learning a most biased coin among a set of coins by tossing the coins adaptively. The goal is to minimize the number of tosses until we identify a coin i* whose posterior probability of being most biased is at least…
We consider the problem of online graph colouring. Whenever a node is requested, a colour must be assigned to the node, and this colour must be different from the colours of any of its neighbours. According to the greedy algorithm the node…
We consider the problem of inserting one item into a list of N-1 ordered items. We previously showed that no quantum algorithm could solve this problem in fewer than log N/(2 log log N) queries, for N large. We transform the problem into a…
We introduce a parameterized version of set cover that generalizes several previously studied problems. Given a ground set V and a collection of subsets S_i of V, a feasible solution is a partition of V such that each subset of the…
Consider the puzzle: given a number, remove $k$ digits such that the resulting number is as large as possible. Various techniques were employed to derive a linear-time solution to the puzzle: predicate logic was used to justify the…
We introduce a sorting machine consisting of $k+1$ stacks in series: the first $k$ stacks can only contain elements in decreasing order from top to bottom, while the last one has the opposite restriction. This device generalizes \cite{SM},…
We consider positional numeration systems with negative real base $-\beta$, where $\beta>1$, and study the extremal representations in these systems, called here the greedy and lazy representations. We give algorithms for determination of…
Suppose a coin with unknown probability $p$ of heads can be flipped as often as desired. A Bernoulli factory for a function $f$ is an algorithm that uses flips of the coin together with auxiliary randomness to flip a single coin with…
This paper studies the problem of modifying the input matrix of a structured system to make the system strongly structurally controllable. We focus on the generalized structured systems that rely on zero/nonzero/arbitrary structure, i.e.,…
Many problems in signal processing and machine learning can be formalized as weak submodular optimization tasks. For such problems, a simple greedy algorithm (\textsc{Greedy}) is guaranteed to find a solution achieving the objective with a…
The Frobenius Coin Problem is a classic question in mathematics: given coins of specified denominations, what is the largest amount that cannot be formed using only those coins? This brief work covers a variation of such question, posing a…
We give a possible explanation for the mystery of a missing number in the statement of a problem that asks for the non-negative integers to be partitioned into three subsets. We interpret the missing number as one of the clues that can lead…
Packing problems are in general NP-hard, even for simple cases. Since now there are no highly efficient algorithms available for solving packing problems. The two-dimensional bin packing problem is about packing all given rectangular items,…