Related papers: On the Lottery Problem: Tracing Stefan Mandel's Co…
A certain sampling process, concerning an urn with balls of two colors, proposed in 1965 by B.E. Oakley and R.L. Perry, and discussed by Peter Winkler and Martin Gardner, that has an extremely simple answer for the probability, namely the…
The $\mathscr{P}$-position sets of some combinatorial games have special combinatorial structures. For example, the $\mathscr{P}$-position set of the hexad game, first investigated by Conway and Ryba, is the block set of the Steiner system…
In the generalized Russian cards problem, we have a card deck $X$ of $n$ cards and three participants, Alice, Bob, and Cathy, dealt $a$, $b$, and $c$ cards, respectively. Once the cards are dealt, Alice and Bob wish to privately communicate…
Composition theory can be used to analyze and enumerate the number of ways a dealer in Blackjack can reach any given point total. The rules of Blackjack provide several restrictions on the number of compositions of a given number. While…
Muchnik's paradox says that enumerable betting strategies are not always reducible to enumerable strategies whose bets are restricted to either even rounds or odd rounds. In other words, there are outcome sequences x where an effectively…
The lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) claims that a deep neural network (i.e., ground network) contains a number of subnetworks (i.e., winning tickets), each of which exhibiting identically accurate inference capability as that of the ground…
Chances of a gambler are always lower than chances of a casino in the case of an ideal, mathematically perfect roulette, if the capital of the gambler is limited and the minimum and maximum allowed bets are limited by the casino. However, a…
Consider a game consisting of independent turns with even money payoffs in which the player wins with a fixed probability $p \geq 1/3$ and loses with probability $1 - p$. The Labouchere system is a betting strategy which entails keeping a…
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules for round-robin tournaments of $n$ competitors. Specifically, $n$ competitors are competing for a prize, and a tournament rule $r$ maps the result of all $\binom{n}{2}$ pairwise matches…
The lottery ticket hypothesis states that sparse subnetworks exist in randomly initialized dense networks that can be trained to the same accuracy as the dense network they reside in. However, the subsequent work has failed to replicate…
We consider a generalisation of the classical coupon collector's problem, in which at each time step a collector either receives a new copy of a randomly chosen coupon, or loses all their previously collected copies of that coupon. We…
The design of sparse neural networks, i.e., of networks with a reduced number of parameters, has been attracting increasing research attention in the last few years. The use of sparse models may significantly reduce the computational and…
We prove an interesting fact about Lottery: the winning 6 numbers (out of 49) in the game of the Lottery contain two consecutive numbers with a surprisingly high probability (almost 50%).
The \textit{Collatz's conjecture} is an unsolved problem in mathematics. It is named after Lothar Collatz in 1973. The conjecture also known as Syrucuse conjecture or problem. Take any positive integer $ n $. If $ n $ is even then divide it…
The Collatz sequence for a given natural number $N$ is generated by repeatedly applying the map $N$ $\rightarrow$ $3N+1$ if $N$ is odd and $N$ $\rightarrow$ $N/2$ if $N$ is even. One elusive open problem in Mathematics is whether all such…
We extend the classical coupon collector's problem to one in which two collectors are simultaneously and independently seeking collections of $d$ coupons. We find, in finite terms, the probability that the two collectors finish at the same…
Hat problems have recently become a popular topic in combinatorics and discrete mathematics. These have been shown to be strongly related to coding theory, network coding, and auctions. We consider the following version of the hat game,…
Puzzles based on coloured cubes and other coloured geometrical figures have a long history in the recreational mathematical literature. One of the most commercially famous of these puzzles is the Instant Insanity that consists of four…
Apportionment is the problem of distributing $h$ indivisible seats across states in proportion to the states' populations. In the context of the US House of Representatives, this problem has a rich history and is a prime example of…
In the theory of algorithmic randomness, several notions of random sequence are defined via a game-theoretic approach, and the notions that received most attention are perhaps Martin-Loef randomness and computable randomness. The latter…