Related papers: Relating bubble sort to birthday problem
As an attempt to bridge the gap between the probabilistic world of classical information theory and the combinatorial world of zero-error information theory, this paper studies the performance of randomly generated codebooks over discrete…
We introduce a fun problem that can be considered as a variant of the classic birthday problem, the Bottleneck Birthday Problem (BBP). It is stated as: what is the maximum number of people we have to choose so that no day of the year has…
We study the random variable B(c,n), which counts the number of balls that must be thrown into n equally-sized bins in order to obtain c collisions. The asymptotic expected value of B(1,n) is the well-known $\sqrt{n\pi/2}$ appearing in the…
A birthday surprise is the event that, given k uniformly random samples from a sample space of size n, at least two of them are identical. We show that Bernoulli numbers can be used to derive arbitrarily exact bounds on the probability of a…
We motivate and prove a version of the birthday paradox for $k$ identical bosons in $n$ possible modes. If the bosons are in the uniform mixed state, also called the maximally mixed quantum state, then we need $k \sim \sqrt{n}$ bosons to…
The birthday paradox states that there is at least a 50% chance that some two out of twenty-three randomly chosen people will share the same birth date. The calculation for this problem assumes that all birth dates are equally likely. We…
The randomized $k$-number partitioning problem is the task to distribute $N$ i.i.d. random variables into $k$ groups in such a way that the sums of the variables in each group are as similar as possible. The restricted $k$-partitioning…
We study a birthday inequality in random geometric graphs: the probability of the empty graph is upper bounded by the product of the probabilities that each edge is absent. We show the birthday inequality holds at low densities, but does…
We revisit the Strong Birthday Problem (SBP) introduced by DasGupta'05, which asks for the minimum population n required such that, with a probability of at least 1/2, every individual in the group shares a birthday with at least one other…
We examine a generalization of the binomial distribution associated with a strictly increasing sequence of numbers and we prove its Poisson-like limit. Such generalizations might be found in quantum optics with imperfect detection. We…
In this paper we introduce the idea of partially sorting data to design nonparametric tests. This approach gives rise to tests that are sensitive to both the order and the underlying distribution of the data. We focus in particular on a…
We show a Birthday Paradox for self-intersections of Markov chains with uniform stationary distribution. As an application, we analyze Pollard's Rho algorithm for finding the discrete logarithm in a cyclic group $G$ and find that if the…
We give an elementary statistical analysis of two High Performance Computing issues, processor cache mapping and network port mapping. In both cases we find that, as in the birthday paradox, random assignment leads to more frequent…
We revisit the classic Pandora's Box (PB) problem under correlated distributions on the box values. Recent work of arXiv:1911.01632 obtained constant approximate algorithms for a restricted class of policies for the problem that visit boxes…
This is a survey paper on Poisson approximation using Stein's method of exchangeable pairs. We illustrate using Poisson-binomial trials and many variations on three classical problems of combinatorial probability: the matching problem, the…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
We study two functionals of a random matrix $\boldsymbol A$ with independent elements uniformly distributed over the cyclic group of integers $\{0,1,\ldots, M-1\}$ modulo $M$. One of them, $V_0(\boldsymbol A)$ with mean $\mu$, gives the…
This Ph.D. thesis concerns the version of the classical coupon collector's problem, when a collector samples with replacement a set of $n\ge 2$ distinct coupons so that at each time any one of the $n$ coupons is drawn with the same…
Let $S$ be a finite set, and $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ an i.i.d. uniform sample from $S$. To estimate the size $|S|$, without further structure, one can wait for repeats and use the birthday problem. This requires a sample size of the order…
In this article we survey properties of mixed Poisson distributions and probabilistic aspects of the Stirling transform: given a non-negative random variable $X$ with moment sequence $(\mu_s)_{s\in\mathbb{N}}$ we determine a discrete random…