Related papers: Exploring mazes at random
We propose a new approach for solving combinatorial optimization problem by utilizing the mechanism of chases and escapes, which has a long history in mathematics. In addition to the well-used steepest descent and neighboring search, we…
Navigating through a visual maze relies on the strategic use of eye movements to select and identify the route. When navigating the maze, there are trade-offs between exploring to the environment and relying on memory. This study examined…
Inspired by the notion of surprise for unconventional discovery we introduce a general search algorithm we name surprise search as a new method of evolutionary divergent search. Surprise search is grounded in the divergent search paradigm…
Exciting contemporary machine learning problems have recently been phrased in the classic formalism of tree search -- most famously, the game of Go. Interestingly, the state-space underlying these sequential decision-making problems often…
Tree search is a fundamental tool for planning, as many sequential decision-making problems can be framed as searching over tree-structured spaces. We propose an uncertainty-guided tree search algorithm for settings where the reward…
In this paper we introduce and investigate a new type of automata which turns out to be rich in deep and complex phenomena. For our model, a maze is a countable strongly connected digraph called the board together with a proper colouring of…
Randomized search algorithms for hard combinatorial problems exhibit a large variability of performances. We study the different types of rare events which occur in such out-of-equilibrium stochastic processes and we show how they cooperate…
We propose a safe exploration algorithm for deterministic Markov Decision Processes with unknown transition models. Our algorithm guarantees safety by leveraging Lipschitz-continuity to ensure that no unsafe states are visited during…
In this methodological article on experimental-yet-rigorous enumerative combinatorics, we use two instructive case studies, to show that often, just like Alexander the Great before us, the simple, "cheating" solution to a hard problem is…
We consider Bayesian optimization of expensive-to-evaluate experiments that generate vector-valued outcomes over which a decision-maker (DM) has preferences. These preferences are encoded by a utility function that is not known in closed…
Query expansion is a well known method to improve the performance of information retrieval systems. In this work we have tested different approaches to extract the candidate query terms from the top ranked documents returned by the…
In this paper, we study a generic direct-search algorithm in which the polling directions are defined using random subspaces. Complexity guarantees for such an approach are derived thanks to probabilistic properties related to both the…
A random search algorithm intended to solve discrete optimization problems is considered. We outline the main components of the algorithm, and then describe it in more detail. We show how the algorithm can be implemented on parallel…
We investigate searching efficiency of different kinds of random walk on complex networks which rely on local information and one-step memory. For the studied navigation strategies we obtained theoretical and numerical values for the graph…
Traditional Quartet Puzzling algorithms use maximum likelihood methods to reconstruct quartet trees, and a puzzling algorithm to combine these quartets into a tree for the full collection of $n$ taxa. We propose a variation of Quartet…
MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables in a Bayesian network given some evidence. Unlike computing posterior probabilities, or MPE (a special case of MAP), the time and space complexity of…
Most prime gaps results have been proven using tools from analytic or algebraic number theory in the last few centuries. In this paper, we would like to present some probabilistic way of proving many essential results. A major component of…
In this article, we prove the completeness of the following game search algorithms: unbounded best-first minimax with completion and descent with completion, i.e. we show that, with enough time, they find the best game strategy. We then…
In natural foraging, many organisms seem to perform two different types of motile search: directed search (taxis) and random search. The former is observed when the environment provides cues to guide motion towards a target. The latter…
We consider multidimensional random walks in pyramids, which by definition are cones formed by finite intersections of half-spaces. The main object of interest is the survival probability $\mathbb{P}(\tau>n)$, $\tau$ denoting the first exit…