Related papers: The Most Malicious 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…
In this paper we study a variant of the Malicious Ma\^{i}tre d' problem. This problem, attributed to computer scientist Rob Pike in Peter Winkler's book "Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection", involves seating diners around a…
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…
In 1970, Statistics giant, Bradley Efron, amazed the world by coming up with a set of four dice, let's call them A,B,C,D, whose faces are marked with [0,0,4,4,4,4], [3,3,3,3,3,3],[2,2,2,2,6,6],[1,1,1,5,5,5] respectively, where die A beats…
Inspired by scenarios where the strategic network design and defense or immunisation are of the central importance, Goyal et al. [3] defined a new Network Formation Game with Attack and Immunisation. The authors showed that despite the…
The Pandora's Box Problem, originally formalized by Weitzman in 1979, models selection from set of random, alternative options, when evaluation is costly. This includes, for example, the problem of hiring a skilled worker, where only one…
Magic: the Gathering is a popular and famously complicated card game about magical combat. Recently, several authors including Chatterjee and Ibsen-Jensen (2016) and Churchill, Biderman, and Herrick (2019) have investigated the…
Given two players alternately picking pieces of a pizza sliced by radial cuts, in such a way that after the first piece is taken every subsequent chosen piece is adjacent to some previously taken piece, we provide a strategy for the…
We consider the chessboard pebbling problem analyzed by Chung, Graham, Morrison and Odlyzko [3]. We study the number of reachable configurations $G(k)$ and a related double sequence $G(k,m)$. Exact expressions for these are derived, and we…
We consider the following one-player game called Dundee. We are given a deck consisting of s_i cards of Value i, where i=1,...,v, and an integer m\le s_1+...+s_v. There are m rounds. In each round, the player names a number between 1 and v…
Bob cuts a pizza into slices of not necessarily equal size and shares it with Alice by alternately taking turns. One slice is taken in each turn. The first turn is Alice's. She may choose any of the slices. In all other turns only those…
A problem posed by Freund is how to efficiently track a small pool of experts out of a much larger set. This problem was solved when Bousquet and Warmuth introduced their mixing past posteriors (MPP) algorithm in 2001. In Freund's problem…
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…
The well known algorithm of Volker Strassen for matrix multiplication can only be used for $(m2^k \times m2^k)$ matrices. For arbitrary $(n \times n)$ matrices one has to add zero rows and columns to the given matrices to use Strassen's…
Interdicting a criminal with limited police resources is a challenging task as the criminal changes location over time. The size of the large transportation network further adds to the difficulty of this scenario. To tackle this issue, we…
The stable marriage problem, as addressed by Gale and Shapely [1] consists of providing a bipartite matching between n " boys " and n " girls "-each of whom have a totally ordered preference list over the other set-such that there exists no…
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…
We give a solution of the following combinatorial problem: "Let one from $n$ married couples in the m\'enage problem (see Problem 1) be a couple of a known mathematician $M$ and his wife. After the ladies are seated at every other chair,…
The probleme des menages (married couples problem) introduced by E.Lucas in 1891 is a classical problem that asks the number of ways to arrange n married couples around a circular table, so that husbands and wives are in alternate places…
The multi-armed bandit is a concise model for the problem of iterated decision-making under uncertainty. In each round, a gambler must pull one of $K$ arms of a slot machine, without any foreknowledge of their payouts, except that they are…