Related papers: On the Hardness of Gray Code Problems for Combinat…
For any integer $n\geq 1$ a middle levels Gray code is a cyclic listing of all bitstrings of length $2n+1$ that have either $n$ or $n+1$ entries equal to 1 such that any two consecutive bitstrings in the list differ in exactly one bit. The…
In [4] we describe a variation of the classical permutation decoding algorithm that can be applied to any binary affine-invariant code; in particular, it can be applied to first-order Reed-Muller codes successfully. In this paper we study…
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…
We can break symmetry by eliminating solutions within each symmetry class. For instance, the Lex-Leader method eliminates all but the smallest solution in the lexicographical ordering. Unfortunately, the Lex-Leader method is intractable in…
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…
The Two-dimensional Bin Packing Problem calls for packing a set of rectangular items into a minimal set of larger rectangular bins. Items must be packed with their edges parallel to the borders of the bins, cannot be rotated and cannot…
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,…
We introduce alphabet-permutation (AP) codes, a new family of error-correcting codes defined by iteratively applying random coordinate-wise permutations to a fixed initial word. A special case recovers random additive codes and random…
Genetic Programming (GP) has found various applications. Understanding this type of algorithm from a theoretical point of view is a challenging task. The first results on the computational complexity of GP have been obtained for problems…
NP-complete problems should be hard on some instances but those may be extremely rare. On generic instances many such problems, especially related to random graphs, have been proven easy. We show the intractability of random instances of a…
We consider the problem of computing a shortest solid cover of an indeterminate string. An indeterminate string may contain non-solid symbols, each of which specifies a subset of the alphabet that could be present at the corresponding…
In the Colored Bin Packing problem a set of items with varying weights and colors must be packed into bins of uniform weight limit such that no two items of the same color may be packed adjacently within a bin. We solve this problem for the…
Let us call a sequence of numbers heapable if they can be sequentially inserted to form a binary tree with the heap property, where each insertion subsequent to the first occurs at a leaf of the tree, i.e. below a previously placed number.…
We study a family of sorting match puzzles on grids, which we call permutation match puzzles. In this puzzle, each row and column of a $n \times n$ grid is labeled with an ordering constraint -- ascending (A) or descending (D) -- and the…
A number system coding for the permutations generated by cyclic shift is described. The system allows to find the rank of a permutation given how it has been generated, and to determine a permutation given its rank. It defines a code…
We investigate coding schemes that map source symbols into multisets of an alphabet set. Such a formulation of source coding is an alternative approach to the traditional framework and is inspired by an object tracking problem over…
Nowadays there are several classes of constrained codes intended for different applications. The following two large classes can be distinguished. The first class contains codes with local constraints; for example, the source data must be…
Consider a sequence of bit strings of length d, such that each string differs from the next in a constant number of bits. We call this sequence a quasi-Gray code. We examine the problem of efficiently generating such codes, by considering…
We consider Proof Complexity in light of the unusual binary encoding of certain combinatorial principles. We contrast this Proof Complexity with the normal unary encoding in several refutation systems, based on Resolution and Integer Linear…
The NP-hard Minimum Common String Partition problem asks whether two strings $x$ and $y$ can each be partitioned into at most $k$ substrings, called blocks, such that both partitions use exactly the same blocks in a different order. We…