Related papers: The Bottleneck Birthday Problem
We revisit the Strong Birthday Problem (SBP) introduced by DasGupta'05, which asks for the minimum population n required such that, with a probability of at least 1/2, every individual in the group shares a birthday with at least one other…
Birthday problem is a well-known classic problem in probability theory widely applied in cryptography, and bubble sort is a popular sorting algorithm leading to some interesting theoretical problems in computer science. However, the…
As an attempt to bridge the gap between the probabilistic world of classical information theory and the combinatorial world of zero-error information theory, this paper studies the performance of randomly generated codebooks over discrete…
A birthday surprise is the event that, given k uniformly random samples from a sample space of size n, at least two of them are identical. We show that Bernoulli numbers can be used to derive arbitrarily exact bounds on the probability of a…
The birthday paradox states that there is at least a 50% chance that some two out of twenty-three randomly chosen people will share the same birth date. The calculation for this problem assumes that all birth dates are equally likely. We…
A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…
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…
The assumption of fingerprint uniqueness is foundational in forensic science and central to criminal identification practices. However, empirical evidence supporting this assumption is limited, and recent findings from artificial…
We study the random variable B(c,n), which counts the number of balls that must be thrown into n equally-sized bins in order to obtain c collisions. The asymptotic expected value of B(1,n) is the well-known $\sqrt{n\pi/2}$ appearing in the…
This article, based on a talk, treats some elementary, but not completely simple examples from probability. They concern multiple birthday coincidences, throwing dice, the combinatorics of the German card game "Doppelkopf", and the…
When a planner must decide whether it has enough evidence to make a decision based on probability, it faces the sample size problem. Current planners using probabilities need not deal with this problem because they do not generate their…
Personnel scheduling problems have received considerable academic attention due to their relevance in various real-world applications. These problems involve preparing feasible schedules for an organization's employees and often account for…
Let $S$ be a finite set, and $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ an i.i.d. uniform sample from $S$. To estimate the size $|S|$, without further structure, one can wait for repeats and use the birthday problem. This requires a sample size of the order…
This paper develops upper and lower bounds for the probability of Boolean functions by treating multiple occurrences of variables as independent and assigning them new individual probabilities. We call this approach dissociation and give an…
We develop a likelihood methodology which can be used to search for evidence of burst repetition in the BATSE catalog, and to study the properties of the repetition signal. We use a simplified model of burst repetition in which a number…
A $(k \times l)$-birthday repetition $\mathcal{G}^{k \times l}$ of a two-prover game $\mathcal{G}$ is a game in which the two provers are sent random sets of questions from $\mathcal{G}$ of sizes $k$ and $l$ respectively. These two sets are…
The Schr\"odinger bridge problem (SBP) finds the most likely stochastic evolution between two probability distributions given a prior stochastic evolution. As well as applications in the natural sciences, problems of this kind have…
In the standard formulation of the occupancy problem one considers the distribution of r balls in n cells, with each ball assigned independently to a given cell with probability 1/n. Although closed form expressions can be given for the…
Information bottleneck (IB) and privacy funnel (PF) are two closely related optimization problems which have found applications in machine learning, design of privacy algorithms, capacity problems (e.g., Mrs. Gerber's Lemma), strong data…
We consider networks of processes which interact with beeps. In the basic model defined by Cornejo and Kuhn, which we refer to as the $BL$ variant, processes can choose in each round either to beep or to listen. Those who beep are unable to…