Related papers: Finding Kissing Numbers with Game-theoretic Reinfo…
We obtain an inequality for the kissing number in 16 dimensions. We do this by generalising a sum-product bound of Solymosi and Wong for quaternions to a semialgebra in dimension 16. In particular, we obtain the inequality $$k_{16}\geq…
Applying circle inversion on a square grid filled with circles, we obtain a configuration that we call a fabric of kissing circles. The configuration and its components, which are two orthogonal frames and two orthogonal families of chains,…
We consider three-dimensional clusters of identical bubbles packed around a central bubble and calculate their energy and optimal shape. We obtain the surface area and bubble pressures to improve on existing growth laws for…
How many adjacency matrix queries (also known as pair queries) are required to estimate the size of a maximum matching in an $n$-vertex graph $G$? We study this fundamental question in this paper. On the upper bound side, an algorithm of…
Continuing the investigations of Harborth (1974) and the author (2002) we study the following two rather basic problems on sphere packings. Recall that the contact graph of an arbitrary finite packing of unit balls (i.e., of an arbitrary…
Packing is a classical problem where one is given a set of subsets of Euclidean space called objects, and the goal is to find a maximum size subset of objects that are pairwise non-intersecting. The problem is also known as the Independent…
We prove that the kissing number in 48 dimensions among antipodal spherical codes with certain forbidden inner products is 52\,416\,000. Constructions of attaining codes as kissing configurations of minimum vectors in even unimodular…
Covering spaces of graphs have long been useful for studying expanders (as "graph lifts") and unique games (as the "label-extended graph"). In this paper we advocate for the thesis that there is a much deeper relationship between…
In 1981, Neil Immerman described a two-player game, which he called the "separability game" \cite{Immerman81}, that captures the number of quantifiers needed to describe a property in first-order logic. Immerman's paper laid the groundwork…
It is well-known that the densest lattice sphere packings also typically have large kissing numbers. The sphere packing density maximization problem is known to have a solution among well-rounded lattices, of which the integer lattice…
Recent work (Xu et al., 2020) has suggested that numeral systems in different languages are shaped by a functional need for efficient communication in an information-theoretic sense. Here we take a learning-theoretic approach and show how…
The classical sphere packing problem asks for the best (infinite) arrangement of non-overlapping unit balls which cover as much space as possible. We define a generalized version of the problem, where we allow each ball a limited amount of…
We prove a sharp upper bound on the number of shortest cycles contained inside any connected graph in terms of its number of vertices, girth, and maximal degree. Equality holds only for Moore graphs, which gives a new characterization of…
Pfender \textit{[J. Combin. Theory Ser. A, 2007]} provided a one-line proof for a variant of the Delsarte-Goethals-Seidel-Kabatianskii-Levenshtein upper bound for spherical codes, which offers an upper bound for the celebrated…
We thoroughly study a novel but basic combinatorial matrix completion problem: Given a binary incomplete matrix, fill in the missing entries so that every pair of rows in the resulting matrix has a Hamming distance within a specified range.…
Infinitely repeated games support equilibrium concepts beyond those present in one-shot games (e.g., cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma). Nonetheless, repeated games fail to capture our real-world intuition for settings with many…
We present an extension of the Delsarte linear programming method. For several dimensions it yields improved upper bounds for kissing numbers and for spherical codes. Musin's recent work on kissing numbers in dimensions three and four can…
A packing of spherical caps on the surface of a sphere (that is, a spherical code) is called rigid or jammed if it is isolated within the space of packings. In other words, aside from applying a global isometry, the packing cannot be…
We study popular matchings in three classical settings: the house allocation problem, the marriage problem, and the roommates problem. In the popular matching problem, (a subset of) the vertices in a graph have preference orderings over…
Grasping objects of different shapes and sizes - a foundational, effortless skill for humans - remains a challenging task in robotics. Although model-based approaches can predict stable grasp configurations for known object models, they…