Related papers: Revisiting the Sleeping Beauty problem
We consider two variations of the classical secretary problem. * A variation of the returning secretary problem where each interviewee may appear a second time with a fixed probability p. The decision-maker observes interviewees…
The "interior goat problem" is a numerical puzzle which has haunted mathematicians for nearly three centuries. Closed-form solutions have only been found for the two-dimensional case, and although approximations have been established for…
The stable marriage problem has been introduced in order to describe a complex system where individuals attempt to optimise their own satisfaction, subject to mutually conflicting constraints. Due to the potential large applicability of…
The method of alternating projections involves projecting an element of a Hilbert space cyclically onto a collection of closed subspaces. It is known that the resulting sequence always converges in norm and that one can obtain estimates for…
The classical and extended occupancy distributions are useful for examining the number of occupied bins in problems involving random allocation of balls to bins. We examine the extended occupancy problem by framing it as a Markov chain and…
In the multidimensional stable roommate problem, agents have to be allocated to rooms and have preferences over sets of potential roommates. We study the complexity of finding good allocations of agents to rooms under the assumption that…
The primary objective of this note is to revisit the two envelope problem and propose a simple resolution. It is argued that the paradox arises from the ambiguity associated with the money content $x of the chosen envelope. When X=x is…
In this paper, I will demonstrate a new perspective on the Two Envelope Problem. I hope to show with convincing clarity how the paradox results from an inherent problem pertaining to the interpretation of Bayesian probability. Specifically,…
In the well-studied Stable Roommates problem, we seek a stable matching of agents into pairs, where no two agents prefer each other over their assigned partners. However, some instances of this problem are unsolvable, lacking any stable…
The gravitational three-body problem is a rich open problem, dating back to Newton. It serves as a prototypical example of a chaotic system and has numerous applications in astrophysics. Generically, the motion is non-integrable and…
Conventional and current wisdom assumes that the brain represents probability as a continuous number to many decimal places. This assumption seems implausible given finite and scarce resources in the brain. Quantization is an information…
It is often objected that the Everett interpretation of QM cannot make sense of quantum probabilities, in one or both of two ways: either it can't make sense of probability at all, or it can't explain why probability should be governed by…
We study popular matchings in three classical settings: the house allocation problem, the marriage problem, and the roommates problem. In the popular matching problem, (a subset of) the vertices in a graph have preference orderings over…
Can we predict the winner of Miss Universe after watching how they stride down the catwalk during the evening gown competition? Fashion gurus say they can! In our work, we study this question from the perspective of computer vision. In…
We study computational aspects of three prominent voting rules that use approval ballots to elect multiple winners. These rules are satisfaction approval voting, proportional approval voting, and reweighted approval voting. We first show…
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…
Consider a coin tossing experiment which consists of tossing one of two coins at a time, according to a renewal process. The first coin is fair and the second has probability $1/2 + \theta$, $\theta \in [-1/2,1/2]$, $\theta$ unknown but…
In this paper we consider two variants of the Secretary problem: The Best-or-Worst and the Postdoc problems. We extend previous work by considering that the number of objects is not known and follows either a discrete Uniform distribution…
A rectangle blanket is a set of non-overlapping axis-aligned rectangles, used to approximately represent the two dimensional image of a shape approximately. The use of a rectangle blanket is a widely considered strategy for speeding-up the…
The "Millennium Prize Problems" have a place in the history of mathematics. Here we tell some little-known anecdotes from the perspective of the planner of that project. These stories are far from their end; more likely they are just at…