Related papers: The clairvoyant ma\^{i}tre d'
In this paper we study the problem of the Malicious Maitre d', as described in Peter Winkler's book Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection. This problem, attributed to computer scientist Rob Pike, 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…
A detailed study is made of the number of occupied seats in an unfriendly seating scheme with two rows of seats. An unusual identity is derived for the probability generating function, which is itself an asymptotic expansion. The identity…
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 consider the problem of probabilistic allocation of objects under ordinal preferences. We devise an allocation mechanism, called the vigilant eating rule (VER), that applies to nearly arbitrary feasibility constraints. It is constrained…
The reader is reminded of several puzzles involving randomness. These may be ill-posed, and if well-posed there is sometimes a solution that uses probabilistic intuition in a special way. Various examples are presented including the well…
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…
Caching has recently attracted a lot of attention in the wireless communications community, as a means to cope with the increasing number of users consuming web content from mobile devices. Caching offers an opportunity for a win-win…
The secretary problem or the game of Googol are classic models for online selection problems that have received significant attention in the last five decades. We consider a variant of the problem and explore its connections to data-driven…
In the Seat Arrangement problem the goal is to allocate agents to vertices in a graph such that the resulting arrangement is optimal or fair in some way. Examples include an arrangement that maximises utility or one where no agent envies…
Consider a theatre consisting of $m$ rows each containing $n$ seats. Theatregoers enter the theatre along aisles and pick a row which they enter along one of its two entrances so as to occupy a seat. Assume they select their seats uniformly…
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…
The $n$-queens puzzle is to place $n$ mutually non-attacking queens on an $n \times n$ chessboard. We present a simple two stage randomized algorithm to construct such configurations. In the first stage, a random greedy algorithm constructs…
In late May of 2014 I received an email from a colleague introducing to me a non-transitive game developed by Walter Penney. This paper explores this probability game from the perspective of a coin tossing game, and further discusses some…
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…
We consider a practically motivated variant of the canonical online fair allocation problem: a decision-maker has a budget of perishable resources to allocate over a fixed number of rounds. Each round sees a random number of arrivals, and…
We study the fair allocation of a cake, which serves as a metaphor for a divisible resource, under the requirement that each agent should receive a contiguous piece of the cake. While it is known that no finite envy-free algorithm exists in…
Relying on configuration spaces and equivariant topology, we study a general "cooperative envy-free division problem". A group of players want to cut a "cake" $I=[0,1]$ and divide among themselves the pieces in an envy-free manner. Once the…
Strategic product placement can have a strong influence on customer purchase behavior in physical stores as well as online platforms. Motivated by this, we consider the problem of optimizing the placement of substitutable products in…