Related papers: The Most Malicious Ma\^{i}tre D'
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor…
Recent papers on approximation algorithms for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) have given a new variant on the well-known Christofides' algorithm for the TSP, called the Best-of-Many Christofides' algorithm. The algorithm involves…
The setting of the classic prophet inequality is as follows: a gambler is shown the probability distributions of $n$ independent, non-negative random variables with finite expectations. In their indexed order, a value is drawn from each…
The Markowitz problem consists of finding in a financial market a self-financing trading strategy whose final wealth has maximal mean and minimal variance. We study this in continuous time in a general semimartingale model and under cone…
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…
The multi-armed bandit is a mathematical interpretation of the problem a gambler faces when confronted with a number of different machines (bandits). The gambler wants to explore different machines to discover which machine offers the best…
In the classical combinatorial (adaptive) group testing problem, one is given two integers \(d\) and \(n\), where \(0\le d\le n\), and a population of \(n\) items, exactly \(d\) of which are known to be defective. The question is to devise…
Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a mathematical model of sequential search with inspection costs, in which a searcher is allowed to select a prize from one of $n$ alternatives. Several decades later, Doval introduced a close…
We consider learning to play multiplayer imperfect-information games with simultaneous moves and large state-action spaces. Previous attempts to tackle such challenging games have largely focused on model-free learning methods, often…
Manacher's algorithm has been shown to be optimal to the longest palindromic substring problem. Many of the existing implementations of this algorithm, however, unanimously required in-memory construction of an augmented string that is…
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is the most popular and most studied combinatorial problem, starting with von Neumann in 1951. It has driven the discovery of several optimization techniques such as cutting planes, branch-and-bound,…
A common format for sports contests involves pairwise matches between two teams, with the #1 player of team A matched against the #1 player of team B, the #2 player of team A against the #2 player of team B, and so on. This paper addresses…
An influential theory of increasing returns has been proposed by the economist W. B. Arthur in the '80s to explain the lock-in phenomenon between two competing commercial products. In the most simplified situation there are two competing…
Consider a variant of Tetris played on a board of width $w$ and infinite height, where the pieces are axis-aligned rectangles of arbitrary integer dimensions, the pieces can only be moved before letting them drop, and a row does not…
We analyze priority queues including DecreaseKey method in its interface. The paper is inspired by Strict Fibonacci Heaps [2], where G. S. Brodal, G. Lagogiannis, and R. E. Tarjan implemented the heap with DecreaseKey and Meld interface in…
A puzzle about prisoners trying to identify the color of a hat on their head leads to a version where there are k more hats than prisoners. This generalized puzzle is related to the independence number of the arrangement graph A(m, n) and…
Information uncertainty is one of the major challenges facing applications of game theory. In the context of Stackelberg games, various approaches have been proposed to deal with the leader's incomplete knowledge about the follower's…
Pandora's problem is a fundamental model in economics that studies optimal search strategies under costly inspection. In this paper we initiate the study of Pandora's problem with combinatorial costs, capturing many real-life scenarios…
This paper is concerned with the optimal allocation of detection resources (sensors) to mitigate multi-stage attacks, in the presence of the defender's uncertainty in the attacker's intention. We model the attack planning problem using a…
A king invites n couples to sit around a round table with 2n+1 seats. For each couple, the king decides a prescribed distance d between 1 and n which the two spouses have to be seated from each other (distance d means that they are…