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In 1733, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in France, set the ground of geometric probability theory by defining an enlightening problem: What is the probability that a needle thrown randomly on a ground made of equispaced parallel…
This work introduces an innovative method for improving combinational digital circuits through random exploration in MIG-based synthesis. High-quality circuits are crucial for performance, power, and cost, making this a critical area of…
Concentration results and probabilistic analysis for combinatorial problems like the TSP, MWST, graph coloring have received much attention, but generally, for i.i.d. samples (i.i.d. points in the unit square for the TSP, for example).…
In this note, we give an explicit polynomial-time executable strategy for Peter Winkler's hat guessing game that gives superior results if the distribution of hats is imbalanced. While Winkler's strategy guarantees in any case that $\lfloor…
We study several variants of a combinatorial game which is based on Cantor's diagonal argument. The game is between two players called Kronecker and Cantor. The names of the players are motivated by the known fact that Leopold Kronecker did…
In this paper a way is suggested for calculating the probability of consecutive number strings within a sequence of n numbers randomly drawn (without replacement) among the set of the first N consecutive numbers, with N>>n. An explicit…
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 introduce the sequence-set betting game, a generalization of An. A. Muchnik's non-monotonic betting game. Instead of successively partitioning the infinite binary strings by their value of a bit at a chosen position, as in the…
We report a new result on lotteries --- that a well-funded syndicate has a purely mechanical strategy to achieve expected returns of 10\% to 25\% in an equiprobable lottery with no take and no carryover pool. We prove that an optimal…
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…
This paper studies the proof of Collatz conjecture for some set of sequence of odd numbers with infinite number of elements. These set generalized to the set which contains all positive odd integers. This extension assumed to be the proof…
We study the Levine hat problem, a cooperative puzzle introduced by Lionel Levine in 2010, in which $n \geq 2$ players must simultaneously identify a black hat on their own infinite stack, each seeing only their teammates' stacks. While the…
In 1956 John Kelly wrote a paper at Bell Labs describing the relationship between gambling and Information Theory. What came to be known as the Kelly Criterion is both an objective and a closed-form solution to sizing wagers when odds and…
The prediction of the final state probabilities of a general cuboid randomly thrown onto a surface is a problem that naturally arises in the minds of men and women familiar with regular cubic dice and the basic concepts of probability.…
It is often reported in forecast combination literature that a simple average of candidate forecasts is more robust than sophisticated combining methods. This phenomenon is usually referred to as the "forecast combination puzzle". Motivated…
Exploring the Collatz Conjecture and changing the expression from 3n + 1 to 5n + 1, we found patterns in different sets of numbers. Some numbers reduce to one (as stated in the Collatz Conjecture), some might escape to infinity, and some…
Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target…
We introduce a combinatorial variant of the cost sharing problem: several services can be provided to each player and each player values every combination of services differently. A publicly known cost function specifies the cost of…
The problem of the malicious ma\^{i}tre d' is introduced and solved by Peter Winkler in his book Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection [1]. This problem is about a ma\^{i}tre d' seating diners around a table, trying to maximize…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…